Ever notice that all these crises tend to be caused by the people supposedly responsible for resolving crises?

I sure wish more people noticed that.

It seems the Bundy Ranch crisis, at least, ended on a positive note. The Bundy Ranch Affair, of course, is not over.

‘After 20 years and multiple court orders to remove the trespass cattle, Mr. Bundy owes the American taxpayers in excess of $1 million. The BLM will continue to work to resolve the matter administratively and judicially,’ the statement said.

Translation: “When the furor over this has died down, that damned Bundy character is going under the biggest bus we can find. But not today.”

But the crisis passed, and it passed in a manner the charred ghosts of a bunch of Branch Davidians must bitterly envy.

As time went by, more and more allies showed up at the Bundy Ranch, pretty much all of them armed. The arrivals included some who described themselves as militias. Today there was an extraordinary scene that gave rise to this photograph. Hundreds of Bundy supporters, on horseback and, I assume, armed, told the federal agents that they were surrounded and had better give back the cattle they had confiscated.

And they did.

A whole world of kudos are due the people who showed up to say “enough.” I await with bated breath the first person to call their actions “unamerican,” so that I may laugh in his face. What these people did was quintessentially American, and it’s about damn time.

Of course there are rumblings of a lot of political scrambling behind the scenes…

The new head of the BLM, Neil Kornze, worked for Harry Reid as a policy adviser from 2003 to 2011. It is reasonable to assume that Reid got him the BLM job, and I would hazard a guess that Reid saw the situation turning into a public relations disaster–Nevada’s Governor and Senator Dean Heller, both Republicans, were more or less siding with Bundy–and told Kornze to give it up.

…But none of that, the truth of which we’re never likely to really know, changes the fact of what was happening out in the sun. The one thing our beloved government’s bloody-handed crisis negotiators haven’t found a way to deal with is a whole bunch of people showing up with guns and saying “F*** your ‘First Amendment Area,’ and f*** you. Go ahead and shoot, if you think you can get all of us before we get all of you.”

That has not happened very often in this old man’s lifetime, and it did bring a smile to my face.

It is really, finally starting to look like a lot of people have had enough of the nonsense. In the face of at least 85% non-compliance with a deadline that passed almost four months ago, the governor of Connecticut and a whole bunch of nervous cops are showing quiet signs of wishing to pretend that the rumored “assault weapon registration” law never really happened. In New York, where the registration deadline is this coming Tuesday, there’s no sign of any last minute rush to comply. And it’s not just the gun owners…

While gun registration may be exceedingly popular south of the Tappan Zee Bridge, and in a few pockets upstate, many (if not most) law enforcement officers and gun owners in the state have publicly rebelled against the law. Many municipal and county governments have joined them in open defiance. Gun owners in New York are well aware of the fact that their county sheriffs, state police, and local officers don’t intend to enforce the law, a stance that many law enforcement leaders have announced publicly.

Knowing that the chief law enforcement officers in most counties have announced that they will not enforce the law, a non-compliance rate exceeding 95% and perhaps exceeding 98% does indeed seem plausible.

“If you don’t have the troopers and you don’t have the sheriffs, who have you got? You’ve got Andrew Cuomo pounding on the table in Albany,” Nojay said.