A lot more options open up when you have an ongoing income stream and relatively open schedule with a cover story for travel. Most of the rest of us have to make money as we go.

Personally, I am risk adverse on that too. I don't want my means of income being something that has "normal" law enforcement on my tail or citizens complaining, and I also avoid the kinds of risky work where someone could murder me and rig it to look like an accident. For example, I don't do roofing or any high ladder work. I won't work a regular schedule with highly predictable out of the house and back to the house times. I used to swap vehicles on an irregular basis, but now am stuck with just one.

We had a crew from the NW head out to the Bundy thing and it was nearly a disaster for them. Why? Deferred maintenance on vehicles caught up with them hundreds of miles from home, and everyone in the support network was too cheap or too broke to do a rescue operation. They almost had to face the choice of abandoning the vehicle, cache gear and weapons and exfiltrating through California vs looking really stupid and asking for local handouts. All of those who most smoothly went in, did that deployment for a while and smoothly exited are on a government pension. I don't have that.

Sorry, bills gotta be paid, vehicle maintenance does not get done with a gun to anyone's head. Gas costs money, food, beans bullets, bandaids. Only the far left has their game together of setting up homeless camps for their activists, and thats a bullshit stunt in my book even for them. When you are talking about conservatives with assets, its appropriate to see that the army gets compensated. If it is not worth it to the guy with ten rental houses to take an equity loan out and get a crew set up the right way for a deployment, why is it supposed to be worth it to me to sink ten grand into weapons armor, gear and travel expenses to go on a show of force saving one of those houses from a crooked foreclosure action?

None of us has had to deal with some guy with a lamed leg who got shot while on an op that we can't file disability for. That's not without precedent either. Those oh so revered Founding Fathers were pretty ruthless with Daniel Shays when after several battles in the revolutionary war, he got shot and disabled, then leaving military service injured, not only was there no system of pension for disability due to battle wounds, they did not even pay him the soldier's wage right, but gave him scrip which he could only cash in with banksters at 10% value. Lafayette had kind of honored/pitied him and presented him with a fancy sword as a gift. He eventually sold it to pay debts and went on to fight in his losing rebellion. Trying to run a farm all on his own manual labor, while nursing injuries suffered while fighting for the benefit of those who just wanted to make sure he paid taxes and interest to them, not the King.

We do need to be looking at compensation for our volunteers, from recruitment to retirement. It is entirely valid.

I'll say this, front and center, a bunch of armed white militia guys rolling up there are as likely to be treated with extreme suspicion if not betrayal from those very same hood rats who regularly betray public defenders and each other. You show me individuals on a case by case basis worthy of it, and there are plenty out there, then that's one thing. but those people are also not looting and burning.