“The best place for weapons when you’re not in the field is to be locked up in the garrison,” Honore’ said. “Our biggest problem before Desert Storm was (soldiers) accidentally firing their weapons, and they’re trained.”I’ve been around guns all my life, but when I was growing up they were locked in the cabinet unless you needed them for hunting.”Honore also said he disagrees with those advocating for military men and women at recruitment offices to be armed. Some armed civilians have taken it upon themselves to stand guard at recruitment locations since the mass shooting at a Tennessee office this summer.
Source: Honore: America’s in denial about gun culture
And he says this after five servicemen were killed by that Jihadist wannabe in a Military Gun Free Zone. It boggles the mind that a General, somebody who is supposed to care for his troops would go along with the idea that being defenseless is better.
But unfortunately, there is a real reason. I’ll leave Kurt Schlichter to explain it:
So why would a commander not order troops who have qualified on their M9 pistols to draw sidearms and ammo and carry them during their duties, at least until this crisis passes? Perhaps their discretion has been withdrawn from higher command – that’s possible, especially with this toxic administration. But more likely it’s because of fear.It’s the fear that some solider is going to have an “incident” carrying a weapon, and that incident is going to lead to questions, and in an environment where the Armed Forces are shrinking, the mention of an incident on an officer’s annual evaluation report can mean the difference between a career and a pink slip. It’s the same zero defects mentality that is keeping our military leadership from being an audacious, aggressive band of warriors and morphing it instead into a timid, passive pack of timeservers.
Source: The Real Reason Our Troops at Chattanooga Were Unarmed Is Absolutely Infuriating
Our Military is now in the hands of what troops call Chairborne Rangers, timid men with an absolute obsession to have a spotless career and have their ticket punched without incidents so they keep advancing. Sort of playing Candyland with the lives of our service people who would be sacrificed in the name of political correctness rather than do what they are supposed to do: Kill the enemy, destroy their stuff and win wars.
The one thing I learned in my very, very limited military career is that the Army doesn’t have a gun culture. They may talk about the warrior spirit but most of the jobs in the modern Army don’t require any more than an annual weapons qualification, and most soldiers only shoot one a year. The Army has a bureaucracy culture. “Everyman a rifleman” no longer exists.
Ignoring (for the time being) the shootings of US military personnel on US soil, we saw this problem in the invasion of Iraq. Transportation units and other supply and support units came under attack from insurgents and suffered high casualties. Why? Because trucks were being driven by soldiers who hadn’t fired more than 100 rounds since basic training. They had no idea how to fight or repel an ambush. They were truck drivers in uniform. The guns were locked up in garrison and a lot of troops got needlessly killed.
Please do not place all the blame on the current administration for our troops being unarmed except while in combat/combat zones. While the official policy came into being at about the same time as the 1968 Gun Control Act, the practice in the US Military goes back to probably two days after Concord/Lexington. It was a meme in movies about WWI and WWII and I do not recall the Pentagon demanding that such a canard be stricken from the films.
Carrying your rifle everywhere you went during basic training was not to familiarize you with the weapon so much as it was just another thing that you could be gigged for. That and to teach you to clean your rifle to the point of wearing down the rifling before a single shot was fired.
stay safe.
The ban/restriction goes back to the Nixon era.