More thoughts on the nuttiness of not allowing weapons on base:
“It’s a tragedy to lose soldiers overseas and even more horrifying when they come under fire at an Army base on U.S. soil,” said President Obama.
Indeed. How ironic: Survive Iraq or Afghanistan then get picked off like a game bird in a bland, institutional “Soldier Readiness Center” in Texas.
Soldiers in other countries are allowed to carry arms on base and even when they are off-duty. In Israel, for instance, soldiers are issued a rifle and then . . . it’s theirs. One sees slender 18-year-old girls, traveling from base, home to the suburbs for Shabbat dinner, still slung with a massive M-16 rifle almost as big as they are. The prevelance of arms doesn’t mean the country experiences the kind of random mass murders seen in the United States. It means that the few times someone has gone crazy with a gun in a city street, he was taken down fast by bystanders.
But not American soldiers. When asked if ordinary soldiers nearby had been carrying their service weapons, Fort Hood spokesman Lt. Gen Robert Cone said piously, “We do not carry weapons. This is our home.” Defense is out-sourced to military police, or even — oh the indignity! — to civilian policemen.
More dips for the tar and feathers.
Gee, why aren’t there ever mass shootings at gun shows?
Read the whole thing. There’s also an appalling story about the USS Cole bombing that I hadn’t heard before.
I served in the Army in the early 80’s. I’m not sure the dot can be connected to political correctness on this one. I always got the sense the brass and senior NCOs simply didn’t trust us.
Even when soldiers were issued weapons, ammunition was never issued to go with it, except in carefully controlled range exercises.
Another Victim Disarmament Zone, courtesy of the gun-control lobby and their friends the Democrats.
Rand – we may need to have US soldiers under arms while at stateside bases.
But this is not some new policy of political correctness. Standard operating procedure at US bases since before the Civil War is that soldiers not actually on guard duty or otherwise in a heightened state of readiness are not carrying weapons.
This is actually the practice in most militaries. Israel is the exception – due entirely to the terrorist threat they face.
Again – we may want to revisit that tradition, but your expert might want to ask first why we do things that way.
Chris Gerrib –
I know this is nitpicking a little, but unless things have changed in the last year or two, Switzerland has a similar policy to the Israelis, and have had for centuries. Those of military age are considered part of the standing militia, and as such are issued firearms and ammo to keep at home, and train with in their own time (most take pistols, but some do take long guns).
It pains me to say it, but DaveP is wrong. The military has no-one to blame but their own leaders for the anti-constitutional infringement of individual rights on base.
There is no law which mandates (or authorizes) federal facilities like military bases to strip the rights of the individuals who work and live there to carry arms. U.S.C title 18 section 930 is often advertised as the justification (as my base commander has) but a quick reading of the law shows that it has NO teeth of its own (which prevents it from being unconstitutional).
And even if it did have teeth, it still would not absolve military leadership of their oath to support and defend the Constitution, which I believe requires them to fight against unconstitutional infringments.
No, this sad day is brought to us by an intense failure of military leadership – a failure to adequately judge those they choose to serve (and lead) in the armed forces, and a failure of integrity – failure to stand for the oath they took.
Military leadership long ago threw their principles and vaunted “Integrity” under the bus of political correctness. It is only sadly logical that bodies would follow.
There is no constitutional infringement issue. Military bases, strictly speaking, are private property. The federal government is the owner. Property owners have a right to regulate how their property is used.
R. Anderson – the Swiss militia are issued individual weapons and both a war reserve and a practice allocation of ammunition. I’m not sure that the active-duty component regularly carry their weapons while walking around on base.
I think Dave C is right — likely the COs just don’t want to chance it for no expected benefit.
And as a property owner, can you charge someone with a felony for bringing a gun to your home? Throw them in jail?
You can’t. The worst they’ll be charged with is misedemeanor tresspassing for failure to remove themselves from your property when you asked.
The government can’t have it both ways – and the Constitution does not enumerate powers for our government to infringe upon our individual rights, ever.
To take your argument to its next logical step, does the government get to strip you of your due process rights the moment you step on to federal property? Does “federal property” grant our government all manner of tyrannical power?
Ryan,
No, the next logical step is: if you don’t like the property owners rules, you don’t have to enter his property.
One other thing, I am a staunch advocate of the 2nd amendment and the right to defend oneself. But, I am also a staunch advocate of private property rights. Like it or not, governments are property owners too.
Jard, the federal government isn’t a private property owner. It’s a proxy titleholder for property owned by the American people.
And….
When my Mom was in high school the kids on the rifle team brought their rifles on to school with them, on the school bus. She, being on the archery team, brought her bow and arrows. Bizarrely, no one was shot.
It’s the culture, stupid. People can be trained to be killers, but the default position is to treat people you consider part of your own tribe decently. Of course, multiculturalism destroys the sense of oneness required for civil cohesion, and it also outlaws the teaching of decency (both positive and negative reinforcements are needed, though the former is better). But if you’re not allowed to say what’s right or wrong …
—
Jardinero is technically correct, but only in the legal sense. The Government has (in this case, and so many others) demanded to have it both ways, and every time they do the Courts let them off the hook. I am of the opinion that the right to personal self defense is inalienable, under any circumstances, and neither the government nor any private property owner can deny someone this right.
I am further of the opinion that the Government (unlike private property owners) cannot set unreasonable restrictions on these rights. They should be necessary and demonstrably closely tailored to an established need in order to to be enforceable. Government just has too many monopolies to be trusted with discretion on this matter; if Burger King sets a rule I don’t like I can go to McDonalds, but I have no such options with the DMV, police station, courthouse, etc.
If the federal government is only exercising its rights as a property owner, as some have suggested, why is it that base commanders and the JAG office supporting them do not cite law stating such as their authority to restrict the rights of those who come on to base?
Why do they use USC 18 930 as their justification?
Moreover, military personnel don’t have the capability to just “not go on to base”. Failure to show up to work (i.e. going AWOL) will land you in jail. Their rights are forcibly taken from them.
And not all military bases infringe upon individual rights to carry arms (Arnold AFB for one allows the carrying of weapons on base, even hunting).
Lastly, if you take an oath to support, defend, and bear true faith and allegiance in the Constitution, does integrity allow you to compartmentalize its principles? The Constitution only applies off of federal property?
I would make the correction that Jardinero is ‘de facto’ correct. It is because none have fought against these illegal infringments that they still occur. Government powers have evolved over the course of history from those enumerated to anything we permit.
There is a similar story about the Beruit bombing in Macrinkos “Rogue Warrior” (I think he wrote about Kerry in that too, long before any election was on the horizon).
Only a few weeks before the bombing Seal Team 6 guys were there looking around to make security improvement suggestions and getting a feel for the atmosphere there. They demonstrated a device that sent out radio signals that would cause any radio controlled bomb to explode (back in the analogue days when they just used car or garage remotes) and even demonstrated it once walking around town when a building a block away suddenly exploded.
So they told the Ambassador “people here want the US out, you need these devices so any carbombs blow up blocks away”
The response? “They love us here. Besides we can’t do that, someone innocent might get hurt.”
It pisses me off every time I think of it. The politicians don’t give a damn about the lives pledged to protect them.
Richard Marcinko, spelled his name wrong.
I don’t see how the Federal goverment can be considered a private property owner when they can coerce citizens to enter that property.
Subpeona?
AWOL?
DMV/MVD?
Social Security?
Customs?
My neighbor can choose not to allow people on his property that carry weapons, but he doesn’t have the power to force me on to his property and then demand I sacrifice my rights. That is what the government is doing. The two are not comparable property owners.
I think it is the perception of a standing army actively armed that could potentially make people nervous which causes these decisions to be made. Even lords and kings would often lock up all the weapons in storage during peace time. If the threat abroad was diminished then a nervous ruler would see the only remaining threat to the monarchy would be the army itself. I think the founding fathers to a degree were nervous of a standing army taking over the country in a military coup. One of the reason they made the commander in chief a civilian.
Wasn’t there the situation at the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that all of the ammo was locked up? I read somewhere that the Navy did somewhat better in shooting back in response to the attack because Navy personnel all have assignments in the General Quarters drill, and damage control teams had tools to break open the ammo lockers.
It seems that, in those cases, strict liability should follow, no? 1Megadollar per life? How about 10? It should be high enough to ensure they do their job.
“Sovereign immunity, bitch! So suck it!”
That’s actually the legal argument. Just the terms are different. Fairness ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.
Sovereign Immunity is absolutely one of the things I would abolish for all time if I were King for a Day. We can establish more narrowly tailored policies that allow the government to perform its police functions without making it unaccountable entirely.
There may be a case for not allowing all military personnel on base to be armed, but if only E’s and above had been armed at Ft Hood yesterday I would think the situation could have been terminated sooner with less loss of life.
A corollary to Cecil’s thought is that he might have gone to a post office, schoolyard, or similarly disarmed location instead.
I’m with Brock.
Any location that demands disarmament is simultaneously accepting legal liability for their protection.
If Trump Tower is a strict no weapon zone – and having a weapon might have saved a life – then you can at least bring the freaking suit.
IIRC, Seattle is trying to make strict no weapon zones out of buses – while allowing unmuzzled pit bulls. It doesn’t take too many bus rides to realize that there’s a whole lot of weapons on the damn bus, and none of them are in the hands of the union guys, the suits, the elderly, the parents with kids, etc.