Minutemen May Be Gone, But Gun Nuts Are Still Looking For The Thrill Of Hunting Border Crossers
Even though it has been more than three years since the national Minutemen organization based in Arizona, and run by movement cofounder Chris Simcox, shuttered its operations, there are still would-be vigilante militiamen out patrolling the Arizona desert on the lookout for illegal border crossers. And because they are smaller cells and increasingly radical, they are proving to be a real problem.
Most recently, one of these militiamen made headlines when he got into an armed confrontation with a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy. This was especially noteworthy, since Sheriff Joe Arpaio -– a well-known nativist figure himself -– made a point of denouncing the vigilantism of the border watchers.
The border-watch movement has significantly dropped in popularity in recent years, largely due to the murders of an Arivaca man and his 9-year-old daughter by movement leader Shawna Forde in 2009, as well as the lethal rampage of onetime border-watch organizer J.T. Ready in 2012, and capped off by Simcox's recent arrest on charges of child molestation.
Nonetheless, they have come creeping back along the fringes in the form of small cells that do not attempt to answer to a national movement and are freer to become much more radical than the Minutemen, who in contrast aspired to appear mainstream and often vowed to "weed out" criminals and extremists – though the cases of Shawna Forde (who, it emerged, had a long and prolific criminal record) and Chris Simcox (who had previously been accused of molesting a child but never charged) make clear that was never really the case.
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/minutemen-may-be-gone-border-militia
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