30,000 National Guardsmen! ZOMG! They are preparing for an invasion from the White Supremacists!
Not at all. I mean, if they were expecting trouble, at least they would have a magazine in the frigging rifles!
(Click to enlarge)
And some do not even have a weapon:
We have an upcoming administration that wants to look butch and thinks it needs the South American Dictator Party Day image.
Well, at least it appears that their trigger finger discipline is good.
I’ll take a shot and suggest that the Powers That Be are trying to prevent an accidental shooting of a bumpkin by having no mags in place. I saw that on a cop at a street fair sort of thing in Jerusalem. She had an empty mag well in her pistol, a pistol lanyard, and 2 mags in a pouch on her belt. That surprised me. I thought about asking, but my conversational Hebrew is non-existant.
DC cops with rifles do have mags. I gotta find a pic I saw.
I can’t find it. sorry.
I understand the idea of leaving the rifles unloaded when they are NOT in duty. But if you are on patrol or on duty outside? We are not Israel and that has never been the strategy unless they are not expecting trouble. I do believe they are not allowed to carry spare mags because I don’t see the pouches filled and in lot of cases not even mag pouches are visible.
And not a side arrm either.
Thanks for looking. I am aware that we’re not Israel. ? I wouldn’t expect infantry to have side arms.
I would expect at least an officer with a sidearm… I could not find squat
It was the same thing way back in the 80s. They issue you a rifle and ONE empty mag… goodness! We cant give you AMMO!! You might actually SHOOT someone(like your idiot co) !! In 85 I was in Mississippi when we got hurricained. They had ng troops guarding against looting with EMPTY rifles. We used to play war games in Georgia and it was the same thing, no ammo
Plenty of stories after Hurricane Andrew about NGs patrolling without ammo and ended up being beaten by locals and robbed of their equipment. Some of them would contact local gun owners they knew for mags and ammo
That’s consistent with Israeli policies for long guns. They actually make a carrier for a 30 round AR magazine that clips into the magazine well while people with folding stock UZIs used the 90 degree magazine couplers to clip them to the stock, I don’t recallthe Galil solution. When I was there in 1982 I knew the Knesset guards were serious because they were the only ones with magazines in their UZIs.
@Slow Joe Crow: When I was there in 2014 and 2017, those with rifles had magazines in place. Many of them had chamber flags with a string tied to the charging handle. My rabbi’s brother, who still lives there, said that it was because the tourists got nervous. I didn’t question him. Still, what non-gunny would understand the role of a chamber flag?
Basic Training, 1998. First day of Basic Rifle Marksmanship. Get issued our M16s so they can show us which end is the fiery death end before taking us to the range. No mag, no ammo…no need for them.
We go to lunch before heading to the range. Can’t bring the rifles inside. So they put two recruits outside as guards.
Unarmed, 18 year old guards with no training other than “make sure no one takes these.” No radio, no cell phone, and it was an “open” base at the time so literally anyone could come and go as they pleased.
Guy standing next to me looks over and says “gee, look at all those free M16s” and winks at me.
Every time I see pictures like this, I think of that.
Someone who had done this kind of duty in the NG has posted that in addition to not having magazines, his group had to remove the whole bolt carrier group from the gun.
30,000 guys with clubs.
Si, I’m not good enough with M-16s to tell if the bolt carrier group is present in any of those photos above. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if you can tell from the outside.
Can you tell from the pictures?
The ones I spot-checked all either had the ejection port cover snapped closed, or I couldn’t tell.
That’s not a guarantee but is suggestive of no BCGs.
Remember, it’s illegal for anyone but a “journalist” to have “High Capacity” mags in D.C. /sarc
@ Nuke Road Warrior: Ha, ha, ha. Good comment. Ol’ David.
Well, this show of force ought to do wonders to mend fences with disaffected Americans. Nothing screams transparency and integrity like turning the nation’s capitol into an Orwellian hellscape.
The Left leadership and the new(er) communist contingency in Congress is running with the narrative that 100M white supremacists are about to storm the Capitol.
AOC even claims some ‘Klan’ members in Congress are out to kill her (Blue Telusma, Yahoo News. “AOC feared ‘White Supremacist members of Congress’ would turn her over to Trump rioters during siege”)
Having two division strength’s of troops is to bolster this narrative.
Perhaps the Guardsmen weren’t issued ammo because the Democrats are afraid the Guardsmen will shoot them.
The Guardsmen have been Federally mobilized. They’re not in Kansas anymore. They are under Federal command. Posse Comitatus Act applies now. It would be a Federal crime to perform the duty that the Feds want you to believe they are there to do.
The Pentagon figured the law out: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jun/06/pentagon-disarms-the-guard-in-d-c-20200/
@z: That article is from June. Is that edit still current?
Anytime the Guard — or any military unit –gets deployed, they have what are called “arming orders”.
This defines what equipment they go out with — and often more importantly, what they don’t.
A lot of times, the arming orders don’t include weapons; it’s common in disaster recovery operations. Sometimes rifles but no pistols (or vice versa). Sometimes they include weapons but empty mags, no ammo. Or weapons with no mags at all.
Arming orders are specific enough to say, even if they have mags and ammo, whether they keep a round chambered or not.
And as mentioned in other comments, sometimes they say empty weapons and no BCGs. A very fancy show of force with no teeth, they’re counting on the public not knowing enough about military procedures (or how guns work) to call the bluff.
A FOIA request could discover what the arming orders are for this, but you won’t get it until way after the fact.
It’s unlikely that National Guard units have ammunition at the armories. They usually have to get it from the supply chain when they need it for qualification. Rarely do they have it at other times.
So the probability that 25,000 National Guard troops arrived in D.C. with ammunition is close to zero.
But there’s another reason they don’t have it. The incoming administration doesn’t trust them. Hence the reports now that the FBI is vetting all 25,000 troops.
Also, does anyone think that Army supply sergeants are going to issue 5,250,000 rounds (25000 times the combat load of 210 rounds) for this security theater show, only to reprocess it later when it’s returned?
No mags because they are afraid of an insider attack. A national guard uprising!