Ted Cruz
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April 23rd, 2015 at 10:18 pm
You know who doesn’t like armed American soldiers? Our enemies!
April 24th, 2015 at 7:49 am
The Brass hates the idea too. Military bases are ammo-free zones outside of the ranges.
April 24th, 2015 at 9:30 am
I like it. Why must I render myself defenseless when I visit the PX or go to get a prescription filled? Concealed carry might’ve made a difference at Ft. Hood.
April 24th, 2015 at 2:08 pm
Right Jay! ONLY YOUR ENEMY WANTS YOU DISARMED
April 24th, 2015 at 4:08 pm
If I were king, I would decree that American service members should always be armed while in uniform. Arms would be appropriate to their duties but everybody would have something. Then add Cruz’s proposal to that for off-duty. Willful failure to train service members is not an excuse.
April 24th, 2015 at 8:45 pm
The only response I can think of is “about frikkin’ time”.
April 25th, 2015 at 2:25 am
@Richard,
Only about 10-15% of military personnel are trigger-pullers. The rest are support, logistics, comm, etc. Many no longer even maintain current firearms qualifications; training is only scheduled if an individual is called up for deployment.
That being said, anyone with a CC license/permit absolutely should be allowed to carry, but as pointed out, the brass hates this idea. They try to control everything; even what service members are allowed to do in their free time.
April 25th, 2015 at 7:02 pm
And the brass are probably well- protected by guns against jihadists, I mean “workplace violence”, by the likes of Maj Nidal Hasan. Meanwhile the rank and file military are kept as unarmed targets for fellows like Maj Hasan.
April 25th, 2015 at 7:05 pm
@Skeptical_Realist
I would be surprised if the number of trigger pullers was that high. You would probably have to count artillery and tank crews and pilots and naval combat arms to get there. All service members can and should be trained to use personal arms, however. I (and I assume, they) are getting sick of massacres of unarmed, on duty service members. Like the recruiters in Little Rock. And if I were king the brass would be free to resign.
April 26th, 2015 at 1:16 pm
Adding to an advantage of owning a gun safe is; the law immunizes any individual in lawful possession and control of a handgun and uses secure gun storage from a qualified civil liability action. A qualified civil liability action is the criminal or unlawful use of a handgun by a third party if at the time of access the handgun was inoperable by the use of secure gun storage. Thus owning a gun safe would be protecting an individual from state prosecution as it demonstrates responsible gun ownership.
April 26th, 2015 at 1:22 pm
As an ex-USAF officer who had one non-combat but deployable posting, followed by a very very REMF posting, I fully endorse the “military personnel in uniform shall be armed at all times” position.
As others have noted, there’s a small part of the military that are trigger-pullers (infantry to artillery to fighter pilots), then a significant fraction that are combat supporting (non-trigger pullers who deploy), and then a huge contingent of non-deploying bureaucracy. That last category might as well be regular corporate functionaries with a dress code. There’s not a lot of “sense of urgency” in that group or, worse, any recognition of what their just-one-more-form processes do to make life suck. Any “we’re doing it for the warfighters” rhetoric seems really perfunctory.
On 9/11/2001, I had just recently arrived at my second posting, and the whole country went to THREATCON DELTA (as they called it back then), and the senior leadership at that very very REMF base looked at each other and went, “How do we do THAT?” So they went to the manual and saw that the base commander needed to “convene a battlestaff”. They’d never done that, so they asked some DNIF fighter pilot how such a thing would be done at an operational base and then, cargo-cult style, they did that, up to and including activating a reservist intel officer because they didn’t have any available intel types on the base BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE A MISSION THAT REQUIRED INTEL. That guy was bored out of his skull, and I was sitting right next to him, trying to keep from rolling my eyes. But, by God, they certainly knew how to contract for someone to retrofit a room, within a week, into a dedicated battlestaff command center, complete with three projection screens for powerpoint slides and a podium and a big U-shaped table-thing and the A/C works…
I think carrying a loaded weapon, round in the chamber, concentrates the mind wonderfully. When you carry in the line of duty, it certainly drives home the idea that your duty inherently includes the possibility of fighting. When you don’t carry, there’s a tendency to think that the troops and security forces will keep the bad guys away from little ol’ you, which works really well until they don’t, because at that point you are absolutely the softest target. No only have you no suitable means of resistance, you probably have no capacity to assume the mindset, having assumed that someone would protect you your entire career.
I think military service, no matter what your specialty, should include fighting skills, at minimum with a pistol. Frankly, unarmed, pistol and/or longarm skills should be objectively ranked for all military service members in addition to their physical strength and endurance, with on-base facilities open for practice daily, just as there are gyms open at most hours on base. (Also, they should eliminate the male vs female PT test standards and replace them with absolutely objective performance bands, but that’s a rant for a different time.)
April 27th, 2015 at 8:25 am
Tirno,
Great commentary, thanks.
“Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”― Niccolò Machiavelli