My newest piece from Fox News starts this way:
In debates on gun control, gun opponents usually speculate about what might go wrong. Unfortunately, the current debate over arming soldiers on military bases is no different.
Except for the military police, soldiers on military bases are banned from carrying guns. But that hasn’t always been the case.
The ban itself hasn’t been around that long. It was proposed during the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992 as an effort to make the military a more "professional business-like environment." President Clinton rewrote and implemented the ban in 1993.
After the attack at Fort Hood this past week, many soldiers no doubt wished they had been carrying a gun. The six minutes before military police arrived at the scene proved much too long for the three people killed and 16 wounded.
Soldiers who survived the 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning,Sgt. Howard Ray and retired Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, warn it is time the 1993 rule be revised.
Master Sgt. C.J. Grisham points out that there have been “nearly two dozen shootings at U.S. military installations” since the 1993 ban. Yet such attacks have not occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, where virtually all soldiers have carried a loaded weapon. Nor were they occurring when guns were allowed to be carried on U.S. bases. Gun-free zones in the military have not worked any better than they have in civilian life. . . . .
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