March 16, 2016 01:03 PM UTC

"Militia Class" At Pueblo County Middle School?

• 12 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

A reader forwarded us this rather alarming story from KRDO-13 out of Pueblo County yesterday, about a course offered to middle school students in Colorado City:

“It’s a lot of guns to have in a school, especially because you don’t have this many just at your house or something,” 8th grade student Courtney Proctor said.

[Jim] Heath, a state coordinator of Project Appleseed, brought the three day program to Craver Middle School. The course aims to teach people across the country how to fire weapons accurately and safely, with a foundation of American history…

Volunteers from Project Appleseed and the NRA worked with the students to eliminate the element of fear associated with guns.

At first blush, a course in gun safety and marksmanship doesn’t seem that out of place, especially in a small-town setting like Colorado City. In today’s climate of paranoia over even the slightest perception of being “anti-gun,” a public school’s course on gun safety in a small Colorado town is not something big-city Democrats would want to take the political risk of meddling with.

The problem is, if you look into this “Project Appleseed,” as the New York Times did a few years ago, there seems to be a lot more going on here than “gun safety.”

So far Appleseed has taught 25,000 people to shoot; 7,000 more will learn by the end of this year. Its instructors teach this skill not for the purpose of hunting or sport. [Pols emphasis] They see marksmanship as fundamental to Americans’ ability to defend their liberty, whether against foreigners or the agents of a (hypothetical) tyrannical government. Appleseed frames this activity as being somewhere between a historical re-enactment and a viable last resort…

Inside the Appleseed Project, the question of where an armed citizenry should draw this line remains open. [Pols emphasis] Later that week, as he sipped a Coke at a nearby McDonald’s, [founder Jim] Dailey flirted with an answer. “If you ever have to reach for your guns, you’ve lost before you started,” he said, and then doubled back. “Now, there are probably some narrow, hypothetical exceptions to that. Like if somebody in the government said, ‘We’re taking over the country.’ You might find there’d be a spontaneous. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be. And to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn’t want to see it.”

…Dailey’s frustration with the government peaked during the 1990s after the fatal conflicts at Ruby Ridge and Waco. “Uncle Sam told 76 Americans to come out of their own house, lay down their arms and spread-eagle on the ground,” he says of Waco. “Does that sound to you like the sovereignty of the individual?” At that time, growing restive, he bought more than half a million pounds of rifle stocks at an army-surplus auction. He named his new venture “Fred’s,” after his dog, and wrote indictments of the Clintons and the “New World Order” that reached 94,000 readers. As the radical right gathered steam in the ’90s, Dailey’s anger fixated on the United Nations, which he saw as a metagovernment bent on covertly undermining American sovereignty. [Pols emphasis]

As you can see, Project Appleseed has motives, ulterior or not, that extend distantly beyond the stated goal of “eliminating the element of fear” about guns. In the photo you see above right from the 8th grade public school classroom the indoor portion of this course was taught in, there’s a list of grievances presumably shared by American colonists–including taxes, religious freedom, and “taking rifles away.” But to the founder of Project Appleseed, the Revolutionary War is not some remote history lesson.

It’s something they train the kids to fight. And that is a dubious thing indeed to teach in a public school.