Gone In An Arizona Minute

The Minutemen Militia is calling it quits.

The Arizona-based border watch group that burst onto the national scene in 2005 sent an email to its members this week announcing the corporation has dissolved.

The group’s president, Carmen Mercer, of Tombstone, said she and the board’s two other directors voted to end the group’s five-year run because they were worried her recent “call to action” would attract the wrong people to the border.

On March 16, Mercer sent out an e-mail urging members to come to the border “locked, loaded and ready” and urged people to bring “long arms.” She proposed changing the group’s rules to allow members to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers instead of just reporting the activity to the Border Patrol.

“We will forcefully engage, detain, and defend our lives and country from the criminals who trample over our culture and laws,” she wrote in the March 16 e-mail.

Mercer said she received a more feverish response than she expected — 350 personal e-mails she said — and decided the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps couldn’t shoulder the responsibility and liability of what could occur, she said.

“People are ready to come lock and loaded and that’s not what we are all about,” Mercer said. “It only takes one bad apple to destroy everything we’ve done for the last eight years.”

When Mercer realized she had at least a short battalion's worth of yahoos ready to put holes in anyone making a run for the border, she wisely realized she went too far.  She knew exactly what she was saying with the rhetoric, but for some crazy reason she didn't expect anyone to actually take her seriously.  350 emails made quite a nasty electronic trail that would have made it clear beyond a doubt she was absolutely responsible for any violence that would have surely come if she had followed through.

It's a good thing she didn't go ahead.  I understand the need for border security in the United States in 2010, but armed militia groups providing it just was never the way to go.