At home in Idaho, Ammon Bundy finds support for his family’s views on public lands

The first sign that you’ve arrived at the Bundy family’s Emmett home is a poster board affixed to the fence in front of a small apple orchard. Scrawled in Sharpie is the phrase, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. “ It’s a motto of sorts. Ammon Bundy calls himself a “sunlight kind of guy.” Before his family’s infamous standoffs near Bunkerville, Nevada, and Burns, Oregon, he was living in the dark, he said. Now he’s got a new view on life that he’s eager to share, he said, and some Idahoans are eager to listen. Bundy said his priority now is spending time with his wife and six children. But remnants of the standoffs still bubble up each day. “I’ll always get someone that calls me,” Bundy said at his home in mid-October, after catching up with a friend calling from federal prison. “Life has never, ever been the same — in a good and a hard way. I think it’ll take years and years to kind of dissolve.” And in many ways, he doesn’t want it to dissolve. Bundy accepts speaking engagements across the West at conferences and rallies that touch on gun rights, environmentalism and agriculture — some of them controversial. He often tells the stories of the standoffs and the subsequent trials. And, of course, he advocates the view that has come to be synonymous with the Bundy family: that the federal government has no authority to own or manage land in the states. That’s not to say he’s anti-government, Bundy said. He reached out to the Statesman in September to dispute that characterization in an article on a local Second Amendment rally. “I believe that we have to have government,” Bundy said. “I believe that it has to be accountable, and it has to be limited, and it has to be for the purpose of protecting the individual. Otherwise there’s no need for it, and actually becomes more destructive than not having it in the first place.” Bundy espoused some variation of these principles in Bunkerville and Burns. Now he takes the message to Utah, Montana, Idaho. At an April stop in Modesto, California, Bundy called the state’s well-documented water issues “a lie,” claimed ice from asteroids replenishes the Earth’s water and said environmentalists are out to “entirely destroy the happiness of human life,” the Modesto Bee reported...MORE