Just in time for the 2009 National Riffle Association Convention, “Explorer Scouts” have taken on a whole new, post-9/11 militia bent!

Were you ever a boyscout or a girl scout? I ended up quitting when I got annoyed at all my badges being like “ballet!” and “make up!” when the boys got to learn useful things like “knots!” and “make fires!” — though maybe things have changed.

(Or, you know maybe they just focused on keeping gays and atheists out of the organizations.)

But there’s a whole new scene in the scouts: training kids to be Border Agents and Terrorist Fighters.

The New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauer has a fascinating piece today on the Explorer Scouts, “a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago” training children, some as young as 13 and 14 to act like immigration watchdogs and anti-terrorist forces (as if they were the same thing.)

There are some pretty worrying quotes in the piece:

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”

Now, I might have gotten annoyed at the Girl Scouts, at least my troop, for enforcing arbitrary gender differences (which is exactly how I described it when I was ten) but I can get behind the idea of an organization that strives to teach children about civic duty and pride.

But then you read something like this:

Cathy Noriego, 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.”

A 16-year-old child feeling empowered by the loud weapon in their hands is really not quite the same thing as feeling indebted to give back to your community, is it? And by the way, of course she feels empowered by that gun. IT’S A GUN — IT COULD KILL SOMEONE! The only thing it’s built to do is kill someone! Nothing makes you more powerful than you being alive and them being dead.

Membership in the Explorers has been overseen since 1998 by an affiliate of the Boy Scouts called Learning for Life, which offers 12 career-related programs, including those focused on aviation, medicine and the sciences.

But the more than 2,000 law enforcement posts across the country are the Explorers’ most popular, accounting for 35,000 of the group’s 145,000 members, said John Anthony, national director of Learning for Life. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many posts have taken on an emphasis of fighting terrorism and other less conventional threats.[...]In a competition in Arizona [...] one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. “If we’re looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like,” he said, “then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don’t know, would you call that politically incorrect?”

Oy!

Now, maybe I’m ignorant about what it’s like to live on the border and the realities of what’s that’s like. Maybe I should be for any organization that seeks to limit human trafficking.

But maybe that doesn’t mean we should be turning civic duty organizations in youth paramilitary patrols?

takepart by checking out Kids For A Clean Environment, which urges children to…er, take part, minus the guns.