Showing my ignorance but in a political tone what is a "brown shirt"?

someone who walks in lockstep?

Brownshirts.......

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Brown%20Shirt

The brownshirts distinguished them from the SS who wore black.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

The Aryan Nation for one are called "brown shirts". If there are other post WWII references I don't know them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_shirts

#4, modern usage, will give you more information on its current context.

Nazi police who went around arresting people for, say, attending a public town hall meeting.

or Americans. At one time called the Nazi's but other names come to mind as well....

handed over all of their adult thinking and morals to Hitler & his team. They did dirty work and called themselves moral. They were patsies and torturers and mass murderers. They had reverted to childhood in the way that psychopaths force their followers to "grow down" so that they will behave as sadistically & mindlessly as children.

A child's mind in an adult's body with adult skills is a powerful & dangerous thing.

A movement sort of like the US militia movement. A group of thugs used by the Nazi party hierarchy to police meetings and terrorize their opponents. Was to replace the Wehrmacht and form a Peoples Army. At one time the SS was subordinate to the SA. The Night of Long Knives changed all that and the SA was no longer the power it once was in the Nazi Party.

The term is used today to denote fascists.

When they grew too popular, HItler ordered the arrests and murders of the top leadership. After that, the SS filled all the vaccuum of power. Even so, there were competitions and rivalries.
The Gestapo
The Military
The SS
are only three of the groups which at times cooperated, and often competed.

Unfortunately, in this age, it is not easy to find a reasonably researched and well written history of the Nazi party or its control over the country. There are some decent books from the 70s and 80s which still dared write on the subject.

They started out with some minor victories, and using horrific economic conditions (made worse by the French and their repayment demands) to their advantage, they concocted an imaginary enemy - the jew. Security was promoted, personal rights gratefully given up in exchange.

and were 'Absorbed into regular units with more discipline

for instance.. "Chrystal Night" when the windows of jewish shops were smashed.. things got out of hand and .. in a time of shortage, replacing the glass was 3 1/2 times the total use of glass in the country in a normal year.

lack of discipline was/is expensive

"Who's going to pay for all this?" Who said Nazis couldn't be practical?

Who after the Night of the Long Knives were displaced by the blackshirts, the Schutzstaffel (SS). During early Nazi Germany they were the primary instrument of political repression.