Right.

Carrying a firearm = self defense. Fine. Someone might attack you, you can defend yourself.

Occupying land that is not yours = protest action. Fine. You'll probably get arrested or at least sent on your way, but fine.

Occupying the land AND carrying a weapon to defend yourself isn't just like "oh man, if someone tries to rob me during my protest operation, I'll be able to defend myself!" No, it's tacitly admitting that people are going to come and arrest you, and you expect to put up a violent fight.

Nobody's under any illusion that the police are going to march in there, put handcuffs on everyone, and walk out.

> Arguably, they intended to use them to defend themselves if they were attacked. (By humans, yes.) They were not hunting people down and assaulting them.

Then again they overtly sought to institute their own court system, and overtly sought to subject government officials to trial for various crimes by that court system, and issued threats for non-cooperation with that effort, so its not at all clear that the end game, were they not arrested before that escalated further, wasn't "hunting down people and assaulting them".

> They were not hunting people down and assaulting them.

Not with the guns, and not physically, much. But they most certainly were threatening people, according to the FBI complaint against them:

"The person with Ritzheimer told the woman he knows what kind of car she drives and he was going to follow her home and burn her house down, according to the complaint."

I prefer to call mine an anti-assault weapon. I don't have any need or plans to assault anyone, but I may have a need to defend against someone who'd like to assault me.

You don't have to assault someone for your weapon to become an "assault weapon". A semi-auto pistol grip rifle is an assault weapon. Especially when the clear purpose of them having these weapons are to be used in combat.

No it is not a defense to say that they are defending themselves. These people illegally encroached property that was not theirs.