The Daily History Chronicle

On August 31, 1992, Randy Weaver walked down an Idaho mountainside and ended an 11-day siege that had already killed his wife, his teenage son, and a federal marshal. Ruby Ridge holds a routine fugitive warrant, an FBI shooting later ruled unconstitutional by the government’s own task force, and a multimillion-dollar settlement the government never called an apology, all inside the same eleven days. It became one of the defining grievances of the American militia movement and a name still invoked on opposite sides of every argument about federal power.