Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More

[groovedaddy]

IMPERIAL, Calif. — Ten minutes into arrant mayhem in this town near the Mexican border, and the gunman, a disgruntled Iraq war veteran, has already taken out two people, one slumped in his desk, the other covered in blood on the floor.

The responding officers — eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 — face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots — BAM! BAM! — fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.

“United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!” screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued.

It is all quite a step up from the square knot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/14explorers.html?ref=us

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I don't remember a terrorist badge in the BS manual . . . .

[T Wolf]

2. What sick little fucks these kids already are - and they will become the McVeighs of our future

if this is not stopped right now.

But then, what do you expect from the Klan Scouts of Amerika?

[EC]

3. So now we are like the Israeli's?

Are we going to have a Massad unit for them too?

[tom_paine]

4. The creepy Hitler Youth shit continues. Bad news for all of us.

Not only that, but the article states about 2/3rds of the way down) that these Hitler Youth exercises have resulted in more than a few sexual abuse cases by their Freeper Law Enforcement "mentors".

Surprise surprise.

Bad news all around. Bad enough that VIPS and Citizen Corps and Infraguard are enpowering untrained yahoos with Authoritarian mentality, now we have kids being molded into the same.

Creepy and dangerous. A bad trend that continues unabated.

These are our Block Wardens of the future.

[Recursion]

5. Everybody just relax

The Explorers are an extension to the Boy Scouts that let people get some vocational training for a career they're interested in, in this case law enforcement. There are other Explorer posts that do auto repair, or civil engineering, or forestry, or sailing. Mine did theater (really). This isn't an attempt to raise a covert army of fundamentalists; this is the NYT freaking out any time it sees kids with airsoft guns.

EDIT: it's "posts", not "troops", IIRC

[BridgeTheGap]

6. The Scouts were originally formed in Britain for exactly this purpose.

People from urban areas are unfamiliar with camping out, etc.
Admittedly, this doesn't look all that good.
http://www.netpages.free-online.co.uk/sha/military.htm

[Recursion]

7. Baden-Powell's recruits in the Boer War weren't up to it

Exactly; he wanted kids from the slums of London (remember, this was still some old-school Charles Dickens shit going on there) to have seen a tree before they enlisted.