PINETOP-LAKESIDE — Local Police Explorers have once again
brought home gold. Explorer youth leader Lt. Ritchie Rosales, one
of the original members of Pinetop-Lakeside Post 7060 who helped
win trophies again this year will be joining the Pinetop-Lakeside
Police Department after graduating from the spring 2012 Police
Academy. Rosales is the first Explorer from Post 7060 to make the
transition from Explorer to officer.
Rosales was a member of the Pinetop-Lakeside Police Explorer
Post 7060 team that competed in the January 2012 Explorer Tactical
Competition held in Chandler.
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jim beck posted at 6:47 pm on Sun, Feb 12, 2012.
We all appreciate honest, respectful, drug-free, boys and girls who would like to serve their country or community, but something about the premise of 14 yr. olds in flack jackets, weilding assault rifles is disconcerting to me. I know the African War Lords enlist children to fight for them, but here in America? 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. What ever happened to the square knot, and the pup-tent? What ever happened to the innocence youth once had? Why wait until these kids are 14? How about issuing the Cub Scouts with Uzzi's? Training kids to "secure" or "take down" a terrorist is more like what extremists teach their youth. Anyone remember Hitler's Youth Corps., or read Orwell's 1984? Along with the PSA videos that tell citizens, "If you see something, say something" we are becoming what the National Socialists engineered for the citizens of Germany, where anyone that disagrees with government will be labeled as an extremist or terrorist and hence a threat to national security.
One such Explorer, Cathy Noriega, 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.”
In my opinion, children like Cathy should be excited about the boy next door, and getting on the cheerleader squad, rather than fighting criminals---or loyal Americans.
I guess a society based on war, and violence, and where our adolescents are weaned on violent, video war games, death and destruction, and before a kid reaches 19 yrs. old, they have seen an average of 200,000 acts of violence on TV, and lives in a country that is pertepually engaged in war, what else could we expect? I'm sorry, but it's simply not a healthy state of mind.
The photo used to illustrate this story tells it all.