Not the Boy Scouts of yesteryear

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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.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

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Cathy Noriega, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets — in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range.

“I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”

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Many law enforcement officials, particularly those who work for the rapidly growing Border Patrol, part of the Homeland Security Department, have helped shape the program’s focus and see it as preparing the Explorers as potential employees. The Explorer posts are attached to various agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police and fire departments, that sponsor them much the way churches sponsor Boy Scout troops.

“Our end goal is to create more agents,” said April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent and mentor at the session here.

“My uncle was a sheriff’s deputy,” said Alexandra Sanchez, 17, who joined the Explorers when she was 13. Alexandra’s police uniform was baggy on her lithe frame, her airsoft gun slung carefully to the side. She wants to be a coroner.

“I like the idea of having law enforcement work with medicine,” she said. “This is a great program for me.”

And then she was off to another bus hijacking.

www.nytimes.com...


Welcome to the police state.

read this post on the Girl Scouts
US Girl Scouts prepare for war, pestilence - DHS's new recruits
www.abovetopsecret.com...

It's like we live in Bizarro Land or got sucked into a sick episode of the Twilight Zone....or something worse

Maybe not exactly the Scouts of "yesteryear," but operating under the exact same premises. The Scouts have always had a little bit of police state in them. The Scout Law all Scouts must pledge to even contains references to loyalty to country and country leaders, defending them in word and deed, regardless of who it is that is speaking or acting against said leader. Also there's this:

A SCOUT OBEYS ORDERS of his patrol-leader, or scout master without question. Even if he gets an order he does not like, he must do as soldiers and sailors do, he must carry it out all the same because it is his duty; and after he has done it he can come and state any reasons against it: but he must carry out the order at once. That is discipline.

from the original Scout Law. You can obviously incorporate any authority figure into that one.

Heh, how about this gem:

A SCOUT IS THRIFTY, that is, he saves every penny he can, and puts it in the bank, so that he may have money to keep himself when out of work, and thus not make himself a burden to others; or that he may have money to give away to others when they need it.

"others when they need it..." like BAILING OUT WALL STREET!?!?

I obviously was never a scout. The only people I have ever been cool about taking orders from (outside of my parents) were my coaches. Of course I can't ever recall getting an order from a coach that involved anything I found unethical... except for bleacher sprints, those have got to qualify as torture under the Geneva accords.

Thanks, warrenb. I remember reading about this before, but it didn't generate nearly as much interest as it might deserve.

Whatever happened to teaching kids some simple survival skills? Oh, we don't want people to be able to take care of themselves anymore, do we? Nah, just give them guns to play with and tell them there are terrorists in our midst.

“Our end goal is to create more agents,” said April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent and mentor at the session here.

I'm personally not comfortable with the idea of recruiting kids for law enforcement and military. My nephew went to boot camp for the National Guard this summer and just got back to start his senior year in high school.

I didn't know they could recruit kids so early. Honestly, I thought I had missed his graduation...

reply to post by burdman30ott6


Those two that you quoted made perfect sense 50-100 years ago, and they sound like the advice my Grandpa would have given me! He was a thrifty man, a Combat Vet from Korea, and a truck driver till he died! No retirement, SS, or any other form of aid! He never even used his VA mortgage option!

Anyhow, the oaths sound kind of ominous in today's Socialist climate where the Constitution is expendable and the following orders without question may result in sodomizing a prisoner or shooting an unarmed American, but when the oath was written it portrayed the good morals and ethics of the time!!

Here's another long thread about the same thing:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

and another one that you yourself had posted to, WarrenB:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

my 2cents, (I'm biased, as an Eagle Scout), I would have signed up for this stuff in a HEARTBEAT were it offered to us.

These kids aren't being indoctrinated, or recruited or anything like that. They're being EXPOSED to legitimate occupations. Whether or not they move into a similar career as adults is their choice.

I'd allow my son or daughter to sign up for this, no prob.

It really ticks me off when anyone diss's the Scouts. I can trace nearly every success I've had in life to lessons or skills learned in Scouting.



[edit on 9-9-2009 by tjack]

[edit on 9-9-2009 by tjack]

Someone needs to tell those kids that they aren't going to do well if they are sneaking with their buds and pointing their guns at the head of the person in front of them.

reply to post by tjack


Eagle Scout here myself.

THis whole thread is missing a fundemental premise of scouting and Explorer Posts. Posts can be better described as single issue groups or troops. You can have posts for law enforcement, coast guard, farming etc etc etc. My post 153 revolved around basic and advance camping and survival skills etc.

People here seem to imply that ALL scouts are basically being groomed as a new age hitler youth or something :shk: Not every Troop or Post focuses on law enforcement

reply to post by burdman30ott6


The current one states

Scout is Obedient.
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobeying them.
www.usscouts.org...

If you really want to tak about the origional passage in the scout law from 1908 then its this:

A SCOUT IS LOYAL to the King, and to his officers, and to his country, and to his employers. He must stick to them through thick and thin against anyone who is their enemy, or who even talks badly of them.www.inquiry.net...

Originally posted by burdman30ott6
Maybe not exactly the Scouts of "yesteryear," but operating under the exact same premises. The Scouts have always had a little bit of police state in them. The Scout Law all Scouts must pledge to even contains references to loyalty to country and country leaders, defending them in word and deed, regardless of who it is that is speaking or acting against said leader. Also there's this:

A SCOUT OBEYS ORDERS of his patrol-leader, or scout master without question. Even if he gets an order he does not like, he must do as soldiers and sailors do, he must carry it out all the same because it is his duty; and after he has done it he can come and state any reasons against it: but he must carry out the order at once. That is discipline.

from the original Scout Law. You can obviously incorporate any authority figure into that one.

I spent most of my childhood years in the Boy Scouts, and hold the rank of Eagle. Your statements are just simply not true. Patrol Leaders and Scout Masters did not dish out orders that must be obeyed by their fellow scouts. Is there a leadership structure? Yes. But I never received a single "order" in my 10+ years in scouts. The leadship structure exists for organization and to teach valuable leadership skills to kids who might not otherwise learn them (think of captains on sports teams, it's the same idea).

That being said, every Boy Scout troop is different, and there may be some that practice a more rigid command structure. However from my perspective, and the perspectives I've heard about first-hand from others, scouts is mostly about learning useful life skills, building fires, and being outdoors. There's really no police state indoctrination to speak of.

reply to post by burdman30ott6

My scoutmaster never "ordered" me to do anything. And he was an OSI agent in the U.S. Air Force. You would have thought that ordering people around would have come naturally to him. Go figure. I loved the Boy Scouts.

The Explorers are obviously different than the Boy Scouts. It is more vocationally oriented to law enforcement and paramedics. It has always been that way as far as I can remember. My post was a Paramedic Explorer post. We went on lots of disaster drills, but never carried guns. Although we shot up the countryside on our camp outs.

As the parent of a new Boy Scout, the OP is way off base. The Adult leaders and parents in our Troop are around just to make sure the Scouts don't do anything dangerous to themselves. Our Troop is Boy run, they plan everything, they make major mistakes and then have to deal with the consequences. They are the Leaders of themselves, elected by the other Scouts.

The end result is that they end up as productive young adults who can function and thrive as leaders in today's society, when many 19 year olds are still living at home playing their Playstation 3 and have never held a job their entire life. My 12 year old Son could be stranded in the wilderness alone for a few days and not even break a sweat worrying, can you say that of your child?

Compared to the average American teenager:

Scouts are 88% less likely to drop out of High School
Twice as likely to be a Community Leader.
4 Times more likely to be a FBI agent.
3 Times more likely to be an Astronaut. 11 of the 12 men to walk on the Moon were Scouts.
Twice as likely to graduate as an officer from one of our military academies.


As others have stated the group the original poster is showcasing is an Explorer Post which is focused on a specific career path.

Read up and learn before you start going all NWO on us please.