"For the love of whatever, if the Branch Davidians had wanted to keep their children safe, they would have sent them all out." ap

This sort of misperception is quite common among subjective outsiders.

What it ignores is the nature of distrust of such insular religious communities.

The above quoted opinion suggests that these loving parents would entrust the lives, welfare, and upbringing to strangers; quite likely strangers that did not share their faith, and that would not treat and raise them as the parents would themselves.

And considering the government's gross misconduct in this case, I can easily understand why it would be deemed severely untrustworthy by the besieged.

If you think through the chronology, this more enlightened perspective should make more sense.

When the armed, masked government commandos staged their initial raid; handing their children over to them would have been unthinkable!
I don't know of any responsible parent that would do such a thing.

And as time wore on, and minutes turned to hours, and hours turned to days, and days turned to weeks, and weeks exceeded a month, the besieging government forces did little if anything to demonstrate net benevolence.
Yes.
Government forces let fresh (probably homogenized) milk* into the compound to feed the babies and children.
"They were holding their own children hostage." ap

They almost certainly believed they were protecting them from aggressive, antagonistic, ruthless government forces.

And while it's easy as pumpkin pie to second-guess their actions with our 20:20 hindsight; the fact is their judgment proved right for most of 7 weeks.
How were they to know they'd all die by immolation?

Did they distrust their government?
Sure.

DON'T YOU?!?!

And they had vastly better ground for such distrust than you or I.

If my home were besieged by armed, aggressive, clearly antagonistic government troops, I would not be inclined to send my own blood kin out to them, for the benefit of the kin.

* It bugged one of the milk cartons, to listen in to the conversation inside the compound.

"when the bigots of this world have been privileged for as long as they have, to them equality feels like discrimination." shiftless2