Answer me this.

[Occhidiangela]

I heard it in passing that there had been some shoot outs lately with private citizens guarding the border. AM radio news from a local station. They talked about the areas south of San Diego.

Mexican drug runners in military garb shooting at persons too close to their infiltration/defiltration routes. Are you referring to San Diego CA, or San Diego, TX? San Diego, TX is out near Alice, TX, which is not all that far from where Dick Cheney went lawyer hunting with the wrong shotgun load a while back. ;)

Aha.  They do carry fire arms. Policy may frown upon their use, but they are in fact, an armed militia. Looks to me, after reading the whole thing, that they are offering public lip service, to ease the minds of the 'bleeding heart liberals.' Mind you, this is just my opinion. You don't take guns along with you to use as decoration and never once pull them out to use them.

BS. Presence calls for such an armed posture, see the majority of UN peacekeeping missions. See police on patrol. Guns carried, not generally used.

They are armed!! I've seen them in photos with M16s and mini 14s. In hand. At the ready. Pistols on belt with plenty of ammo. Clips.

And they have been given a strict RoE. You note that the rule is "you screw up, we send you home."

The stuff there from the manual is lip service, plain and simple. Anybody with a lick of sense can see right through that.

Your cynical opinion, which I will add to your category of "Bollocks." However, the risk is pressent that someone will violate the RoE. No question. It can happen, humans are their imperfect selves.

Also in the manuals. They carefully avoid national parks where they would be deprived of firearms.

Also to avoid unintentional confrontations with federal and state park rangers, who look out for the usual armed drug runners and other leakers in parks as part of their expanded duties.

Policy: If you choose to arm yourself, you will do so for the purpose of self defense only; you will never have to take action to defend yourself, for you will abide by the rules of no contact and no engagement.

That is a standard military RoE method with which I am most familiar: fire only if fired upon. It is used by the UN in every peacekeeping operation with which I am familiar.

You and others in this conversation are ignoring "presence." Jahcs' comment on "liability versus operational" intents may be close to the truth, due to the LULAC challenges and other carping by Mexicana Irredenta factions within our borders.

There is both a political and a functional purpose to the quoted policy. Politically, it is to preserve legitimacy. The theme is the "neighborhood watch" method for assisting official law enforcement, which vigilante action does not do. Vigilantism exacerbates law enforcement's problem, which the Minutemen do not wish to do.

Quite a few Minutemen patrol in private aircraft, sort of like the Civil Air Patrol. It is not all boots on the ground surveillance of a porous border. If they had UAV's --there are a variety of small, hand launched UAV's that would suffice for local patrol missions -- their efforts would be more effective, so long as those UAV's do not come into conflict with DEA, and Border Patrol, and Customs airborne border surveillance that the current official operational method.

Occhi