Militia Disbanded By Leaders
The Idaho-based militia organization that once claimed 2,000 members nationwide has quietly disbanded, and its leader is vowing to remain clear of the militia movement, in part because radicals have taken it over.
Samuel Sherwood said the United States Militia Association, which he founded out of his Blackfoot home, officially folded on Sept. 1.
“The whole movement is being distorted on one side by the press and the media and taken over by the nuts and the crazies on the other,” Sherwood said.
He made his comments in an interview with the South Idaho Press.
Sherwood said the remaining leaders of the association decided in June - as the 81-day standoff between federal agents and freemen was ending in Montana - to dissolve after five years, but the organization had been in a period of decline for more than a year.
Fueling the demise over the spectacle in rural Montana, he maintained, was the refusal of state Legislatures around the nation to recognize the United States Militia Association as a peaceful group and act “so we don’t have a gang of guys with guns.”
Only lawmakers in Washington and North Carolina would even hear him out, he said.
He called legislators in Idaho “constitutionally and legally ignorant.
“We were trying to create a separation between what the freemen were doing and what the mainstream militia movement was doing” but failed, Sherwood admitted.
“Bit by bit, people became more and more disillusioned and disenfranchised.”
Earlier this spring, the association could not find volunteers to circulate several initiative petitions it was pushing.
Its monthly newsletter that was mass-produced and mailed to members was being sent out in limited numbers for selected members to photocopy and pass on to others.
Meeting attendance was dropping and fewer and fewer people were sending in their membership money.
At 46, Sherwood says now that he is only interested in taking care of his family, which he has moved to northern Utah after the decision to dissolve the militia group.
He is working as a computer analyst.
“We’ll see what comes, but I’m pretty well done,” he said.
The organization got national attention following the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and Sherwood’s writings have repeatedly drawn attention to the association.
In his books and past speeches, Sherwood predicted that the existing government would fall in a political war with Satan, that entire states would burn, that homosexuals will be put to death as will abortionists, rapists, unfaithful politicians and any criminal who cannot be rehabilitated in seven years and that Jesus Christ will use the “Law of the Lord” - the U.S. Constitution - to rule America.