Last week, Meteor Blades shared a story of a self-appointed border guard, Kevin Lyndell Massey, arrested in Brownsville, Texas on gun charges. He's part of Rusty's Rangers, a group which has been busy making a nuisance of themselves along the border.
As a convicted felon, Massey had forfeited his Second Amendment right to bear arms. That was the basis of his arrest. (He was apparently not the only person charged in this case.) Turns out that he was more heavily armed than initial reports of his arrest might have suggested:
Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who searched Massey's hotel room in Brownsville after an Oct. 20 arrest, found an AK-47 with six loaded magazines, a loaded handgun, a ballistic helmet and several cameras, as well as the ammunition box filled with suspected ammonium nitrate and fuel, according to court documents obtained by the San Antonio Express-News.
Lest we forget, ammonium nitrate & fuel were key components of the truck bomb Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995.
Lately, Massey's been busy with something called "Camp LoneStar" on private land near Brownsville, Texas:
Massey described detaining border crossers in the Facebook comments to one of the Camp LoneStar videos, which showed militiamen detaining border crossers at gunpoint and cuffing them with their hands behind their backs with zip ties.
Maybe they all ought to be charged with
impersonating an officer, too.
Kidnapping, even.
In Massey’s hotel room, agents found his loaded rifle, ammunition and several immigration IDs belonging to numerous individuals.
Another Rusty Ranger, one John Frederick Foerster, has also been taken into custody. Apparently, the Rangers are even
protecting the border from the Border Patrol:
According to the complaint document, on Aug. 29, U.S. Border Patrol agents from Fort Brown came across Foerster in the brush, at which point the defendant pointed his Zastava 7.62x39mm pistol at the agent. The agent fired several shots at Foerster, a member of the Rusty’s Rangers militia. Massey and Edward Varner, another member of the group, were in the immediate area of the shooting and both were armed, the complaint read.
They post videos of their patrol and detention activities on FaceBook.
Foerster and Massey have each committed prior felonies, which prohibits them from carrying firearms under federal law. Both have been charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, a class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
My question? Do we get to call these guys terrorists? (Or are we limited in applying that label only to Muslims?) At any rate, they're definitely not the kind of people one would want to call "patriots."