A group of armed men are holed up today in the tiny headquarters of the Malheur Federal Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon, camping with their food and guns in a handful of government buildings.

They are right-wing militiamen from across the country. They say they stand for liberty, property rights, and the state of Oregon, and that they are protesting against the mighty injustice that has been done to the Hammonds, a father, Dwight, and his son, Steven: ranchers who face a five-year sentence for setting illegal fires on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. In their eyes, the militiamen have occupied buildings that are the seat of illegal federal domination of area ranchers.

The Hammonds were arrested and jailed in 2011 for two arsons, in 2001 and 2006, which burned dozens of acres of federal land. The Hammonds say the fires were range management burns started on their own property, and though they were convicted, the judge in the case sentenced the elderly Dwight to three months in prison, and sent Steven to jail for a year and a day — terms far shorter than the federally mandated sentence of five years, as specified in the 1996 Federal Antiterrorism Effective Death Penalty Act. The federal government appealed the decision, and the Ninth Circuit Court upheld the mandated five-year sentence.