Vigilantes, posses, paramilitaries, militias, armed clans' vendettas and feuds, range wars, murderous mobs...
Warlords, dictators, would-be dictators and cult leaders have used mayhem, terror and murder over and over again to further their greed for power. Civilization, it seems, just cannot end mindless tribal behavior.
In 1838, a secret society was established in Missouri by Mormons to protect themselves from attacks and to carry out reprisals -- the Danites, or as they were also called, the Destroying Angels. Their early leaders such as Sampson Avard, Porter Blackwell and Bill Hickman left their violent mark on American history, from the Missouri War of 1838 up to the awful climax of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 120 innocent pioneers near present-day St. George, Utah, in 1857. The LDS church disavowed them officially, and eventually by 1870 the armed militia had dwindled. A predecessor group, the "Armies of Israel," was somewhat organized in 1834 under founder Joseph Smith, when the attacks against their sect began and went on unrelentingly, forcing their moves westward year after year. Smith himself was assassinated.
It is one thing to counter violence with the same. But today we see the unfortunate result of a frontier tradition of individualism becoming an unthinking belligerence and expressing a hatred of a rational civil structure by means of promoting armed resistance to...what? Misdirected rage is easily manipulated by cult leaders (political and religious) who demand conformity, surrender of individual thinking and basic human rights in a climate of antisocial disdain for all decent norms. The inherent hypocrisy and blatant contradiction are not even noticed by their zombie-like followers.
In the course of history, light is periodically extinguished by the darkness. We're not intelligent enough to light a candle and dispel it.
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