After being onslaughted in my inbox for commenting on the Weavers being somewhat responsible for Ruby Ridge, I wanted to see how much of the current general knowledge of the situation is based in reality. The following is based on most of what I was being told in my inbox.
"The Weavers were Religious and while they visited the Aryan Nations compound they were not Racists. They were entrapped by the government. They were gave the wrong court date and without warning were descended upon by the Federal Government, surrounded, dog and child murdered and then never gave any chances to peacefully end the stand off until after the intentional murder of his wife, who was an innocent bystander in all of this."
I do not believe most of the above, but this is the general narrative I've been bombarded with. How close is this to the truth? I've always understood they were essentially Christian Identity movement type people, in a time where these groups were a violent threat, they had notice of a warrant between the missed court date issue and the shoot out. The boy pulled a gun on US Marshalls after his dog was shot, and that Vicky Weaver was shot through a door unintentionally after Weaver and Harris were making patrols to "protect" the cabin. All this wrapped up into the Weavers 'end of the world' style religious beliefs.
A good resource for the Weavers' POV which also assesses the official narrative is the essay 'Running Through Cornfields,' by Jon Ronson, a British investigative journalist. It appeared as part of his book Them: Adventures With Extremists. Some of the essay is available via Google Books, here and here. Ronson's main aim in his book is to demystify and understand a variety of figures who are demonised by the mainstream press by meeting and getting to know them, in some cases over a period of months and years. His account is broadly sympathetic to the Weavers:
[Randy Weaver] had no terrorist plans; he just wanted to be left alone. He did go to a nearby Aryan Nations summer camp, but he got kicked out for smuggling in beer. And he also had political differences with the neo-Nazis. As Ronson explains it, “The neo-Nazis blamed the Jews exclusively, whereas Randy felt that focusing antipathy onto a single race was a mistake. He did not consider himself to be a white supremacist. He was a separatist. This may sound pedantic, but it was not pedantic to him.” [The Nation, 31 Jan 2002]