Fort Stewart Shootings Recall Forgotten Trump Commitment

“Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll highlighted acts of heroism made by soldiers at Fort Stewart during a shooting at the base on Thursday,” Fox News reports. “Driscoll spoke of six soldiers who ‘put themselves in harm’s way’ during the attack that saw five people shot. He said one of the soldiers, who went unnamed, tackled the alleged shooter, U.S. Army Sergeant Quornelius Radford.”

While it will be interesting to find out, the question isn’t so much why Radford went on a rampage as why he succeeded in shooting five victims and had to be subdued by hand, especially after high profile base shootings. As CNN reported in a recap of recent military base shootings:

In 2009, an American Muslim psychiatrist major at Fort Hood opened fire killed 13 people and an unborn child and wounded more than 30 others.

In 2013, a defense contractor and Navy reservist entered the Washington Navy with a sawed-off shotgun and killed a dozen people, wounding eight others.

In another Fort Hood rampage, this time in 2014, a soldier opened fire opened fire killing three and injuring 16 with a handgun.

In 2019, a sailor at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam naval shipyard shot and killed two civilian Defense Department employees and wounded another before committing suicide.

And two days later, a visiting Saudi Arabia Royal Airforce officer armed with a handgun killed three Pensacola Naval Air Station sailors and wounded eight others.

(Not mentioned in the CNN report were 2015’s Chattanooga shootings, where  Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, “motivated by foreign terrorist propaganda,” opened fire on two separate military installations, crashing his car through the gates of one, resulting in his killing five and injuring two.)

All of this was made possible because the armed forces generally do not trust their forces with arms, at least not private ones. As Military.com has reported, “While post commanders by and large determine their own regulations for acceptable behavior on the base they oversee, many locations do not allow any personal firearms to be brought on the installation or stored in base housing or barracks. Troops living in barracks or other similar quarters who own personal weapons typically must register and store them in a base firearms storage facility.”

There are some exceptions, particularly for law enforcement, established in 2016 by  DOD Directive 5210.56, “Arming and the Use of Force.” The directive also “Provides guidance for permitting the carrying of privately owned firearms on DoD property by DoD personnel for personal protection purposes that are not associated with the performance of official duties,” but generally speaking, expect on-base military personnel not to be armed unless under command with issued weapons.

Why this is still the case is a question for President Donald Trump, who has spoken on several occasions in the past about changing DOD policy.

IN 2015, AmmoLand editor Fredy Riehl interviewed a campaigning Donald Trump and asked him directly, “Would you have a problem allowing our military bases to set their own polices with regard to personal weapons and do away with the ‘Gun Free Zones’ death trap?”

“No, not optional.  As Commander-in-Chief, I would mandate that soldiers remain armed and on alert at our military bases,” Trump replied. “President Clinton never should have passed a ban on soldiers being able to protect themselves on bases. America’s Armed Forces will be armed. They will be able to defend themselves against terrorists. Our brave soldiers should not be at risk because of policy created by civilian leadership. Political correctness has no place in this debate.”

 “Trump Pushes to Allow Troops to Carry Personal Weapons on Bases,” Military.com followed up in 2018. President Donald Trump said Friday that he would review policies that keep troops from carrying personal weapons onto military bases. "If we can't have our military holding guns, it's pretty bad, and I'm going to look at that whole policy on military bases," Trump once more pledged.

The Fort Stewart shootings are a wake-up call and a reminder of an unfulfilled promise from his first term. Were they just words? Will the president stop talking and start doing, and order Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to implement a far-reaching policy change that does more than thank military personnel for their service while leaving them at heightened risk? So far, at the time of writing, per CSPAN, Trump’s comments have been limited to promising that the shooter will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Will any of the major “gun rights organizations” remind him of his prior commitments and call on their members to urge the president to act?  

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