The FBI has arrested a Minnesota man who was thought to be plotting a domestic terrorist attack. The FBI’s Minnesota Division, in partnership with other law enforcement including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Minnesota State Highway Patrol, and several local and county level law enforcement agencies, executed a search warrant at a residence in Montevideo, and found several explosives and various firearms there.

The 24 year-old man, named Buford Rogers, was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm by a felon. Among his explosives were Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, and he was in possession of a Romanian AKM assault rifle. Rogers was convicted on a felony charge of burglary in 2011, and no longer may possess a firearm by law.





It’s not yet clear exactly what motive Rogers might have had for such an attack, however the FBI describes him as a “militia type,” and had a hand in the creation of the Black Snake Militia, a group reported to have an anti-government agenda.

According to Fox 9, the Twin Cities’ Fox affiliate, Rogers’ father said that his son did not actually own the guns, that the guns were registered to him. He went on to theorize that someone complained to the police about them. He has no idea why the FBI is saying that a terror plot was thwarted, and that his son is not a terrorist out to bomb anybody.

He also took issue with the FBI’s characterization of the Black Snake Militia as an anti-government militia, saying that nobody’s out to blow up anything. Montevideo Police Chief Adam Christopher does not think it was similar to the larger, national militias, but rather it was a local group with anti-government tendencies.

An article in USA Today discusses the surge in the number of anti-government militias that has occurred since 2008. According to the article, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that there were over 1300 of these groups as the country became more polarized in 2012, going into 2013, particularly around issues such as firearms regulation.

The initial surge in the growth of these groups had to do with anger about the economy and fears over the election of President Obama in 2008. They believe that the ongoing push for even reasonable firearms regulations will continue to spur growth in these groups, as they recruit more people with a slippery slope message that ends with the idea that the government is coming to take everyone’s guns.

While most of these groups are non-violent activist groups, some are armed, and even engage in military style training, in preparation for a future of rife with socialism.

Some organizations on the Center’s list take issue with their findings, because they see those findings as characterizing all limited-government movements as violent, or at least with violent tendencies. However, the Center’s president, Richard Cohen, says that the mood of the far right is mirroring their mood prior to the Oklahoma City bombing. They’ve been asking the federal government to create a task force to analyze such groups.

Furthermore, the USA Today piece discusses the opinions of a former DHS domestic terror intelligence analyst, Daryl Johnson, who believes the Center’s estimate on the number of anti-government groups is low because some of these groups are underground and hard to find.

The Black Snake Militia was not an underground group and may or may not have been preparing a violent terrorism attack, though the discovery of explosives at Rogers’ home suggests that he, at least, was considering some type of attack for reasons that are as yet unknown. A spokesman for the FBI’s Minneapolis office said that they wanted to get a sufficient arrest warrant to get him put away before the weekend came up. The FBI believes that several lives were saved by the arrest.