The irony in “citizen militias” guarding soldiers and recruits.
If you are a fan of irony — real irony, the kind where words and actions mean just the opposite of their definition — you’ll love what happened on July 22 outside a Colorado Springs military recruiting center.
There, a rag-tag group of self-designated citizen “patriots,” armed to the teeth with pistols, semi-automatic rifles and flak jackets, have been standing guard to protect the soldiers inside.
Identifying themselves as members of the III Percent United Patriots, the half-dozen or so militia members patrolled the parking lot of a strip mall on busy Academy Boulevard in the wake of a July 16 attack on military installations in Chatanooga, Tenn., that left four Marines and a sailor dead along with the solitary gunman.
“We’re guarding our soldiers,” Chrystina Page Steinmetz told the Gazette, which noted she kept a two-way radio in her hand and a gun holstered on her hip. “We’re not here to be vigilantes.”
The loosely organized group is one of many nationwide that has showed up, uninvited, to “guard” military installations in places like Cleburne, Texas; Bellevue, Wash.; Louisville, Ky., and Howell, Mich.
Living in a constant state of fear despite wearing camouflaged military-spec equipment, these self-proclaimed patriots are seeking nothing more than attention: They are drama queens participating in their own Army cosplay.
Their justification is that the military — knowing full well the risk of loaded weapons — doesn’t allow troops other than designated MPs to carry weapons at installations.
Regrettably, there have been no terrorirsts, foreign or domestic, stopped in their malevolent tracks as they stormed a recruiting center in suicide vests. In fact, nothing has happened with these frightfully armed parking-lot attendants “preventing” crime.
Well, except for the one guy who accidentally fired his AR-15 into the pavement at the Lancaster, Ohio, recruiting center, prompting shopping-center management to invite the entire group to leave and resulting in misdemeanor charges against the patriot-culprit, Christopher A. Reed. Who could have predicted that? As it turns out, Reed was convicted of the same offense of illegally discharging a firearm in 2013 and was fined $50.
“I’m just a guy doing my job because my own government wouldn’t do it,” he told the Columbus Dispatch. “Nobody got hurt.”
Why is it that the people who are most adamant and vocal about their Second Amendment rights are the ones we’d least like to see armed?
And in Silverdale, Wash., an armed man standing guard outside a shopping center recruiting station was asked by local law-enforcement officers to put away his rifle and shotgun because he was frightening people.
In conservative Colorado Springs, however, the III Percent United Patriots received positive receptions from some passersby, with friendly horn honks and waves.
Their Facebook page espouses the usual toxic mix of guns, conspiracy theories, survivalist tips, coded racism, right-wing politics and poor spelling and grammar. Its followers are convinced that President Obama and the feds are coming to take their guns and impose tyranny.
The group’s website boasts of their work “protecting” the Arizona border with Mexico — mostly peering through binoculars while sitting around in lawn chairs aside a cooler of beer, from what it looks — and of the need for the “absolute restoration of our Bill of Rights.”
Of course, the Second Amendment really is the only part of the Constitution they care about, even though they’re not so strong on the “well-regulated militia” part. Gee, if only there were some place nearby where they could go to sign up to join such an organization.