Ft. Hood: When our defenders are defenseless

November 6, 9:57 AMSt. Louis Gun Rights ExaminerKurt Hofmann

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    AP Photo/ Uniformed Services
       University of the Health Sciences

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At this point in the aftermath of the horrific atrocity at Ft. Hood, there are a great deal more questions than answers--and some of the answers we have heard are likely to be incorrect.  As an example, all the major news outlets reported for hours yesterday that the mass murderer was dead, only to eventually acknowledge that--oops--he's alive after all, but wounded.

Given the fact of the large amount of uncertainty regarding the details, I will, at this point, offer only a few very general observations.

One is the near certainty that the citizen disarmament law pushers are going to exploit this outrage as justification for more restrictive gun laws--they always do that.  Their difficulty will lie in the fact that even the most extreme of the anti-gun extremists tend to know better than advocating the disarmament of the military and police (who, after all, would enforce the disarmament laws, if the government had no means of backing them up with force?).  The government monopoly on force, so beloved of groups like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), does nothing to prevent violence initiated by agents of the government--such a monopoly, indeed, simply provides the perpetrators with the opportunity to carry out their evil with impunity.

Sometimes, a mass shooting will offer the blood dancers an opportunity to justify their calls for bans on so-called "assault weapons," but no such firearms were apparently used for the Ft. Hood rampage.  There's no word yet on where the killer acquired his firearms--I can't rule out the possibility that he obtained one or both at a gun show, but since there was nothing in his records that would disqualify him from purchasing and owning guns (if you can be a major in the Army, you can presumably pass a Brady background check), no "gun show loophole" would have been necessary for him to acquire firearms.

National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea brought up another superb point (see first link beneath the photo)--the killer was an Army psychiatrist.  He would, very likely, have diagnosed soldiers for such mental health issues as PTSD--the kind of thing that under the NICS "Improvement" Act can leave someone ineligible to own firearms.  Just yesterday, we discussed the potential--and growing--risk of one's medical records being used to track, and perhaps confiscate, one's guns.  Yesterday illustrates the fact that putting such power into the hands medical staff could be putting it into the hands of someone who is himself on the edge of evil--and who would benefit from the people around him being disarmed.

Finally, as Cleveland Gun Rights Examiner Daniel White points out (second link beneath the photo), stateside military bases are (perhaps oddly, to the uninitiated) "gun-free zones."  Firearms, both government-issued and privately owned by military personnel, are very tightly controlled.  Back in my days with the 82nd Airborne Division, the only time we were issued live ammunition, aside from when at the range for marksmanship training/assessment, was when it was our turn to guard the "Heavy Drop" facility, where vehicles, howitzers, etc. were rigged for airdropping.  That facility is considered a strategic asset, and thus had to be guarded against potential attack.  Even then, each of us was only issued 5 rounds (or was it 3--this was rather a long time ago--but it was one of those two numbers) of 5.56mm NATO ammunition for our M-16s.

Among those massacred at Ft. Hood yesterday were many who were about to be deployed to Afghanistan, where they will be required to keep their firearms within reach at all times, because the risk of potential attack will be constant.  The lesson is that such risks apply everywhere, and always.

Update: See also Austin Gun Rights Examiner Howard Nemerov's "Ft. Hood: Death by gun control," and Seattle Gun Rights Examiner Dave Workman's "Fort Hood shooting reveals shortcomings of institutionalized political correctness."