Enough is enough, says an armed U.S. Army veteran in Indiana who has decided to take student and teacher protection into his own hands after the horrifying Florida school shooting and threats of school violence rocked his own town.
Mark Cowan says he is keeping watch outside North Side High School in Fort Wayne with his AR-15 and a handgun – at least until added security is in place. Cown told WANE-TV 15 that he’s standing guard to protect students and defend them against anyone who might threaten their safety while they’re in school. He has been in contact with local police and the school resource officer.
“I [decided] to get my butt off the couch and come out here and keep an eye on these kids and teachers. They deserve it,” Cowan told the news station. “They all deserve a right to go home every night without fear of what’s going to happen during the day.”
In addition to being an Army veteran, Cowan is a member of Oath Keepers, an organization of former police officers, first responders and veterans.
“These kids mean a lot to me,” Cowan told WANE-TV 15. “These teachers mean a lot to me … this is my community, and they need protecting. And our law enforcement, as good as it is, can’t be everywhere. So it’s people like myself and the other Oath Keepers that say, ‘I’m gonna take up that slack.'”
However, the school district doesn’t appear to be thrilled by Cowan’s efforts to provide more security.
“We take the security of our schools very seriously,” Fort Wayne Community Schools spokeswoman Krista Stockman told WANE-TV 15. “We understand he has a right to be out there, but we do not believe it adds to the safety of our students. At North Side, as at all of our schools, we have security procedures in place. In addition. at North Side, we have armed police officers in the building every day.”
As WND has reported, the idea of having armed military veterans and law-enforcement officers act as guards to improve school safety is not new. Action star Chuck Norris, an Air Force veteran, has promoted the idea for several years in his exclusive weekly column.
“Which one of our fine law enforcement or military personnel (in any branch) wouldn’t consider it their greatest duty and honor to take a paid or volunteer shift as a guard infront of our schools protecting those precious souls?” Norris asked in his Feb. 19 column.
And in 2013, Norris pointed to Israel, arguing that it’s a “beacon of light for how to protect our children in public places.”
“Israel mandated armed guards at the entrances to all schools in 1995, and those guards are backed up by special police forces,” he wrote. “Despite that school defenses are primarily intended to thwart terrorists, they also deter any would-be psychos who would cause harm to their children.”
Norris continued: “Back at the home of the brave, the U.S. faces multiple mass shootings on academic campuses and the majority still refuses to post any type of armed guard or even unarmed security at schools to protect our children. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 70 percent of public schools do not have a police officer, and more than half (57 percent) have no security staff. There is an old-fashioned term for that lack of security response in these times: stupid.”
I find there is no psychological check run on Oath Keepers members to determine their mental condition and no criminal background check either. If they are ex- military, there is no determination made to see if they suffer from severe PTSD.
Shockingly, someone doesn’t’ even need to have any current of prior service in the military, police or first responder to join. Any John Doe can receive “huge discount on Oath Keepers memberships.”
Instead of paying $40.00, for just $29.95 per year....you get:
Official Associate Member status
Membership certificate suitable for framing
Laminated membership card with sequential member number
Access to our members-only national forum
2 Oath Keepers bumper stickers and 1 back window sticker
Color Oath Keepers brochures and Oath Keepers “push” cards (size of business cards) as an outreach “start up kit.”
Oath Keepers DVD
Pocket Constitution.
And the right to stand across the street from a school with an Oath Keepers patch on your cap while armed with an AR-15 and a pistol.
Reading their membership application, the best I can determine that even the school shooter Nikolas Cruz could have joined and stood across the street from the school with an “Oath Keepers” patch and his AR-15.
A quick search of 82 shootings on the internet shows that at least 28 of the shooters had been in the U.S. military.
Military veterans are more than twice as likely to be mass shooters.
So what we have here now is an individual sporting his “Oath Keepers” patch who has not been vetted in any manner dressed in civilian clothes and wearing sun glasses with a pull-down cap standing across the street from a school with an AR-15 and pistol.
Is this what you REALLY want….is this what we REALLY need?
Reading their membership application, the best I can determine that even the school shooter Nikolas Cruz could have joined and stood across the street.
What a colossal load of steaming bullshit! It's unbelievable what your fevered delusional mind comes up with.
Reading their membership application, the best I can determine that even the school shooter Nikolas Cruz could have joined and stood across the street. What a colossal load of steaming bullshit! It's unbelievable what your fevered delusional mind comes up with.
Is it?
I would be extremely grateful to be proven wrong. See if you can do that by going right now and use a pseudo-name with all other false information to join. You will find that you can join the Oath Keepers as a “John Doe.” I have shown you their membership application….NOW, you PROVE me wrong.
I have shown you how Nikolas Cruz could have joined Oath Keepers and become an Associate Member. Stop with the insults and show me where I am wrong.
PLEASE….show me how Oath Keepers members are vetted with background checks in any form or fashion….PLEASE.
You won't see any of these guys cowering behind a car during the next school shooting.
So YOU say, and of course you would. Oath Keepers are like Gods to you.
Of course you will chose to ignore the fact that one of your Gods, Matthew Fairfield, while as president of a Oath Keepers chapter was jailed on 54 criminal counts related to his alleged storing of a live napalm bomb at his home, along with other explosives kept at a friend's home. And that he had already had been sentenced to two years' probation for carrying concealed weapons.
Then in Tennessee, thre was an armed man driving a pickup truck emblazoned with an Oath Keepers logo arrested in a bizarre scheme to place two dozen officials in a town under arrest.
Oh, there was another Oath Keeper, Charles Dyer, was arrested in Oklahoma for the alleged rape and forcible sodomy of a 7-year-old child; he was also charged with possessing a grenade launcher that had been stolen from a California military base in 2006.
There are MANY other cases, I could go on and on…but you should get the message and understand it.
Yet YOU don’t seem to and you show that you completely satisfied without any reservations whatsoever that these types of individuals are eminently qualified to stand across the street from schools armed with an AR-15 and a pistol….proudly displaying their Oath Keepers patch.
Yet YOU don’t seem to and you show that you completely satisfied without any reservations whatsoever that these types of individuals are eminently qualified to stand across the street from schools armed with an AR-15 and a pistol…
Fricking liar - properly vettted Oathkeepers standing guard at schools is a workable approach.
Yet you still think the cops will "save the children" even after you've seen that they will cower in fear when innocent lives are on the line.
The only "oath" a cop swears to is that he makes it home alive at the end of his shift.
They are not “properly vetted.” They never have been and probably never will be.
So your absurd claim is that Oathkeepers will allow just anyone to stand guard in front of schools? Maybe some of the members in the past have been unsavory characters, but as you say about cops - "it's just a few bad apples". That certainly applies here.
Your agenda here is to denigrate a group of veterans and COPS who refuse to follow UNCONSTITUTIONAL orders and have a plan to offer protection to schools.
Would you be on-board with this if the group worked together with the local police departments who could run background checks on any of the volunteers and weed out those who do not pass muster?
Your agenda here is to denigrate a group of veterans and COPS who refuse to follow UNCONSTITUTIONAL orders and have a plan to offer protection to schools.
I have no agenda. My only purpose is to expose you to the truth about the leadership of the organization you and so many others blindly and foolishly support.
In fulfilling my purpose, I wish to call to your attention that the Montana Supreme Court’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) recommended Thursday that Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, Montana lawyer and founder of the Oath Keepers, be disbarred for violating his attorney oath, according to a recent filing.
Based upon the foregoing factual findings and legal conclusions, the Commission makes the following recommendation:
1. That Elmer S. Rhodes be disbarred;
2. That he be required to comply with the notice provisions of Rule 30, MRLDE upon disbarment; and
3. That he be assessed the reasonable and necessary costs of these proceedings in accordance with Rule 9A(8), MRLDE.
FILE - In this April 16, 2015, file photo, people stand ready to check in volunteers at a staging area outside Grants Pass, Ore., where the local chapter of the constitutional activist group the Oath Keepers was supporting volunteers serving as armed guards for a gold mine on federal land where the claimholders are in a dispute with a federal agency. The federal government and southern Oregon miners have each taken a step back from tensions over the claim. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard, File)
The case, opened a year ago, involved a trio of issues:
1) On April 28, 2014, a federal judge in Arizona filed an ethics grievance against Rhodes for appearing in court “without license or an application to appear pro hac vice.” The latter is a requirement for a lawyer who wants to practice in a federal court located in a state where he or she isn't licensed. Rhodes did not respond to the Judge’s grievance.
2) On May 12, 2014, Rhodes’ Arizona client Michael Roth lodged a complaint against his lawyer, stating that Rhodes had provided incompetent representation and had abandoned him in his civil suit in federal court. Rhodes did not respond to his former client’s complaint.
3) On July 30, 2014, the Commission on Practice set a hearing date for Rhodes to answer to these grievances in person. That date was later adjusted by a day in an amended order. Rhodes did not show up for his hearing.
According to federal court records, Rhodes had a second Arizona client, Jennifer “Jade” Jones, who also found herself without a lawyer in the middle of a civil case in federal court. While it does not appear that she filed a complaint with the ODC, she complained to the federal court. "I am the plaintiff the above titled action," she wrote the judge. "I have been unable to reach my attorney, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, for several weeks."
A series of confrontations
Since the Oath Keepers’ founding in 2009, the organization has engaged in a series of confrontations with the government, the most notable of which was the heavily-armed standoff against the federal government at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.
These confrontations started in 2011 in the Arizona town of Quartzsite when the Oath Keepers inserted themselves into a vitriolic, small-town fight between two factions. Protesters had been arrested at two City Council meetings, and two months later the Oath Keepers assembled in Quartzsite to fight the tyrannical government, prevent martial law, stop the encroachment of the “New World Order," and "restore the republic."
Calling all freedom troops! Oath Keepers Muster! Quartzsite, Arizona! -- Oath Keeper blog entry, July 31, 2011
The Oath Keepers, led by Rhodes, gathered to hold the “Quartzsite Liberty Rally” against the town's then-Chief of Police.
The two protesters that were arrested were Michael Roth and Jennifer Jones.
Current trouble with Montana is not Rhodes’ first rodeo
In May of 2012, Rhodes was publicly admonished by the Arizona Supreme Court and fined $600 for acting as the Quartzite protesters’ attorney when he wasn’t licensed to practice law in Arizona. According to his online biography, he had clerked for the Arizona Supreme Court in 2004, so it seems unlikely he was unfamiliar with the licensing laws.
Even following this admonishment, he continued to represent Mr. Roth and Ms. Jones in Arizona, filing several federal lawsuits on their behalf.
Citing family illnesses, Rhodes filed a request to be released from the some of these cases in late 2013/early 2014, but by April of that year, he simply stopped participating in one of the Jones cases. On April 15th, for example, he failed to appear by telephone for a status conference, and on the 18th was removed from the case by the judge.
04/18/2014 ORDER, Mr Rhodes is discharged from representing Plaintiffs in this matter; the Court will send a letter to the Montana State Bar Association regarding Mr Rhodes' failure to represent his clients and respond to court orders; Plaintiffs Jennifer Marie Jones and John Lavern Jones are now unrepresented in this matter[.]
Rhodes was indeed too busy on those days to represent his client. He was leading the Oath Keepers in another confrontation at Bundy Ranch in an armed standoff against the Bureau of Land Management
Official Associate Member status Membership certificate suitable for framing Laminated membership card with sequential member number Access to our members-only national forum 2 Oath Keepers bumper stickers and 1 back window sticker
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
I bet their members-only forum is a riot. Probably with a membership of about 50% FBI agents (agentes provocateurs) and 35% paid collaborators. It was a favorite hobby of Hoover's.
Everything is done on the “QT” wth them. I find no organizational chart and definitely nowhere is the salary listed that Elmer Rhodes pays himself to serve as president. I find no articles of corporation. It is my opinion that he did not file for organization as a corporation because he would have had to make financial disclosures. The OK would easily qualify as a non-profit. The more I look into them...the more I only see deeper darkness.
I think Elmer discovered a “cash cow” and he is milking her for all she is worth to collect the yearly dues he duped a great number of people into paying using the beautifully magical sounding buzz word “Constitution.” He now even has recognizable names soliciting donations to him. That was done recently after one of the hurricanes.
Oh, I ran across this jewel this evening: Daniel Knight Hayden, an Oklahoma man self-identified as an Oath Keeper, was indicted by a federal grand jury after posting Twitter messages threatening to unleash a violent attack on Oklahoma state government officials on April 15, tax day.
Deckard is a gullible doofus to support this bunch.
Oath Keepers seems to have attracted a lot of the "sovereign citizen" types.
As you know, the Birchers had that same problem. They also had to purge various bunches of antisemites trying to take over the Bircher organization over the years.
