On Wednesday, another mass shooting unfolded — this time at Fort Stewart military base in Georgia. A male Army sergeant, who illegally carried a gun on the base, wounded five soldiers before others tackled and disarmed him.
Typically, only authorized designated security forces such as MPs are armed on duty. Any other soldier caught carrying a firearm faces severe consequences, ranging from a rank reduction, court-martial, potential criminal convictions, dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and even imprisonment.
So why would a soldier risk such harsh penalties? Because if you’re the attacker, planning to murder fellow soldiers, gun control laws won’t stop you. If you expect to die in the assault, as most mass public shooters do, extra years added to your sentence mean nothing. Even if you survive, you already anticipate multiple life sentences or the death penalty.
But for law-abiding soldiers, those same rules carry enormous weight. Carrying a gun for self-defense could turn them into felons and destroy their futures. These gun control policies disarm the innocent while encouraging a determined killer to attack there as they will know that they are the only ones who will be armed.
Yes, military police guard entrances, but like civilian police, they can’t be everywhere. Military bases function like cities, and MPs face the same limitations as police responding to off-base mass shootings.
Consider the attacks at the Navy Yard, both Fort Hood shootings, and the Chattanooga recruiting station. In each case, unarmed JAG officers, Marines, and soldiers had no choice but to hide while the attacker fired shot after shot.
Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley, then commander of Third Corps stationed at Fort Hood, testified to Congress about the second attack there: “We have adequate law enforcement on those bases to respond … those police responded within eight minutes and that guy was dead.” But eight minutes was simply too long for the three soldiers who were murdered and the 12 others who were wounded.
Time after time, murderers exploit regulations that guarantee they’ll face no armed resistance. Diaries and manifestos of mass public shooters show a chilling trend: They deliberately choose gun-free zones, knowing their victims can’t fight back. While we don’t yet know if the Fort Stewart shooter made that same calculation, his actions fit a pattern seen in dozens of other cases. It’s no coincidence that 94 percent of mass public shootings happen in places where guns are banned.
Ironically, soldiers with a concealed handgun permit can carry a concealed handgun whenever they are off base so that they can protect themselves and others. But on the base, they and their fellow soldiers are defenseless.
These are soldiers trained to handle firearms. We trust them with weapons in combat, yet we deny them that same trust on their own bases.
In 1992, the George H.W. Bush administration started reshaping the military into a more “professional, business-like environment.” That shift led to tighter restrictions on firearms. In 1993, President Clinton rewrote and implemented those restrictions, effectively banning soldiers from carrying personal firearms on base.
After the 2015 Chattanooga recruiting station attack, the military slightly loosened the rules. Commanders gained the authority to approve individual service members to carry privately owned firearms. But in practice, commanders rarely grant that permission.
Importantly, U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan were required to keep their weapons on them at all times — even on base. These soldiers needed to protect themselves against threats, and there are no known cases of them turning those weapons on each other. The policy worked.
So why do we make it easy for killers to target our own troops at home? Why do we force soldiers, like those at Fort Stewart, to tackle armed attackers with bare hands?
Let’s stop pretending that gun-free zones protect anyone. They only protect killers.
