“There doesn’t have to be bloodshed in our community,’’ the Harney County sheriff said.Those who “have issues with the way things are going in our government” have a responsibility as citizens to act in an appropriate manner, Ward said. “We don’t ‘arm up’ and rebel,” he said, but rather should “work through the appropriate channels.”“This can’t happen anymore,” he said in a halting voice. “It can’t happen in America, and it can’t happen in Harney County.”Bill Williams, the U.S. attorney for Oregon, who traveled from Portland to Burns for the mid-day press conference, told reporters the community of Burns and Harney County clearly have been “disrupted by the armed occupation.”“We continue working toward resolution and will do so with the primary goal of restoring normalcy to this community,” the state’s top federal law enforcement officer said in his first public comment on the Malheur occupation.The arrests came a week after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown spoke publicly for the first time about the Malheur occupation after being told by federal officials to remain silent as the FBI said it was taking a “deliberate and measured” response without initially setting up roadblocks.Turning up the heat, the Oregon governor called the White House, the FBI director and the U.S. Attorney General, demanding that the FBI take action and “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.” The following day, an FBI negotiator made contact with Ammon Bundy via cell phone as news reporters listened in on a road near the Burns airstrip where the FBI established a command post. But those negotiations went nowhere when Ammon Bundy wouldn’t participate in a follow-up session with the FBI negotiator.Word of Finicum’s death lit up social media. When the two vehicles were stopped, “everyone obeyed orders to surrender except” Finicum and Bundy’s brother, Ryan Bundy, who was shot and wounded, CNN reported.Already, antigovernment and militia groups — including the Bundy family that was behind a still-unresolved standoff with federal authorities in 2014 — are spouting conspiracy theories that Finicum was unarmed, had his hands up and was shot and murdered.

Source: Armed Occupiers at Oregon Refuge Rejected Offers to Leave or Negotiate | Southern Poverty Law Center