27 Jan 16
The Air Force, at least, has finally seen the light!
USAF Base Commanders have been authorized to implement the carrying of guns (presumptively openly or concealed) by “selected” personnel, on and off-duty. Smart airmen, naturally, already have state-issued CCW permits, when and where possible. However, government property has always been a fanatical “gun-free zone” (for everyone but terrorists), until now.
Nothing, it seems, is so hard to see as the obvious! Terrorists can be effectively dealt with in no other way, and, of course, everyone has known this full well for years, but the arrogant PC crowd, even within the military, has forbidden the subject from being discussed openly.
Someone up the USAF food-chain has finally cracked this ice, at great personal risk. When there is a spate of NDs, you know he (whomever he is), and his career, are toast!
We must now brace ourselves for an army of gun-hating liberal alarmists to demean the very idea and demand the policy be reversed, and the liberal media will be only too happy to endlessly shove microphones into their blistering faces. For them, dead innocent (and unarmed) victims are okay, but dead terrorists are unthinkable!
The other unspoken issue is that commanders painfully know and understand that current institutionalized pistol “training” is a joke! Even MPs carry unloaded pistols. No one trusts them with real guns. “Cold” ranges are the ossified “standard” throughout the US military, and dynamic movement, speed-reloads, and instant stoppage-reduction are unheard-of. “Training” is inspired mostly by quaint, collegial, and utterly irrelevant competitions, among people who don’t even carry guns.
After the 9/11 attacks, uniformed military personnel were deployed in domestic airports, openly carrying rifles and pistols. They tried desperately to keep it a secret, but it soon became generally known that all magazines, so prominently displayed, were empty. There was not a single, live round, anywhere in the entire airport. It was all just an empty show. “Warriors” unprepared to do battle. What a revolting contradiction of terms! Those troopers were little more than sacrificial lambs, and this was under a Republican president!
When it has been my honor to train active-duty personnel, we, of course, run all ranges “hot,” and I can’t count the times troopers, enlisted and officers, have come up to me and said, “This is the first time in my entire military career that I’ve ever been treated like an adult on a firing range!”
In fact, we’ve had to run some of our military programs at private ranges, off-base. The entrenched “Training Prevention Department” (otherwise known as “Range Control”) went unbalanced, more than once, when they learned my students were actually running around with loaded rifles and pistols!
In any event, some unnamed hero up the USAF food-chain deserves much credit, and recognition (which he’ll never get!).
Now, how about the USMC, US Army, Navy, and Coast Guard? Are they just chopped liver?
“Like all weak men, he laid exaggerated stress on never changing one’s mind.”
William Somerset Maugham
/John
