The Washington Post has more on the Bundy gang verdict.

While a jury acquitted the Bundy brothers, most of the people charged with the Oregon takeover already pleaded guilty or still have to stand trial on federal charges — a group that includes both Bundys, who are still in custody because they are facing another federal trial in Nevada stemming from a different standoff between the family and the government.

…

During the trial, prosecutors described the takeover as a long-plotted occupation, while attorneys for the occupiers — who did not deny they were there — insisted they were not trying to prevent people from doing their jobs, but were instead protesting government actions.

More than two dozen people involved in the Malheur takeover were charged with conspiring to use “force, intimidation, and threats” to keep federal employees from working at the refuge during the takeover. So far, 11 people have already pleaded guilty to this charge, a series of pleas entered during the months before the Bundy trial got underway.

I daresay they’re all wishing they’d gone to trial.

The most high-profile people charged for the takeover were the two Bundy brothers, who were among the group of seven found not guilty of the conspiracy charge as well as a count of possessing firearms in a federal facility. (That one seems odd to many people, given the voluminous evidence of the occupiers wandering around the refuge with guns, but the charge was specifically for having a gun in a federal facility with the intent that it “be used in the commission of a crime.”)

So…they had the guns just for the fun of it, and not as a way to prevent anyone from strolling in and arresting them?

Come on. If they hadn’t been heavily armed, they would have been promptly evicted. Law enforcement held off because they didn’t want a shoot-0ut.

But then they would say they weren’t committing a crime, they were protesting.

Jim Urquhart/Reuters

The guns are just paperweights.