Explorer Scouts Train to Fight Terrorism

I read this article on the New York Times website about how Explorer Scouts are being taught how to fight terrorism and crime. According to the Times, "one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters." However, teaching 14 to 18 year old kids to handle guns and rifles? Training them to be able to respond to border violence, terrorism and bus hijackings? Really. I mean, I understand if you want to teach thesekids how to resuscitate drowning victims, or treat burns, or deal with excessive blood loss, or whatever else is needed to help a person recover from an injury.

I may have been wrong, but my understanding of the Scouts program was that of teaching kids to "Be Prepared" for any eventuality, especially those that involve victims who need medical attention.Wasn't that the reason that Scouts were given all of that emergency medical training. However, it seems that in this post-9/11 world, the Scout's of "Be Prepared" was really "Be Prepared to Respond To Any Crisis By Knowing How To Maneuver As A Trained Strike Force."

I must have missed the fine print.

But I am beginning to digress. A Scout was supposed to be a sort of EMT, as I stated above. If they wanted to learn how to take down "disgruntled Iraq war vetran[s]", or deal with an "obstreperous lookout" on a marijuana field raid, they were to join the police force when they came of age. It's just too early. What happened to the concept of "childhood innocence?" Or did that die with the advent of the ninetys and nearly ubiquitous internet (not that either of these is to blame; I'm just saying that this era seems to mark the vanishing of true childhood, which may or may not be the subject of another post) to be replaced by omnipresent sarcasm, cynicism and a desire to find things out by oneself, immediately?

However, I again digress. The Scouts were, to me, a manifestation of the decline of innocence. Children were supposed to not be prepared. They were to learn this during their teenage years, sometime before adulthood. And now, with the Explorer Scout program teaching the scouts about "facing down terrorists and taking out 'active shooters,' (those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses)," one begins to worry about whether the notion of childhood can continue to survive, or if it will be snuffed out by these programs that force kids to live in the adult world before they are ready for it.

By the way, before the Scouts program sues me for defamation, I have emailed them, requesting an interview with a representative, so this may well become a miniseries of articles (assuming they respond to me, with my body of work totaling only forty-seven posts over a period of almost twenty months).