Fort Hood Shooting

Letter from Ft. Hood 1st Lt. calling for soldiers to be allowed to carry firearms

Powerful stuff:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10101409318132145&id=18414353&stream_ref=10

Heroism of Sergeant First Class Daniel Ferguson is especially notable, but point of Cook's letter is summed up in his concluding paragraph:

I shall conclude by restating my warning. This will happen again, and again until we learn the lesson that suppressing the bearing of arms doesn’t prevent horrific crimes, it invites them. To those of you who hold elected office, if you hear nothing else I have told you, hear this: you have the power to stop the next massacre from happening. You have an opportunity to restore the sacred Right to bear arms, which has been either stripped entirely or unjustly relegated to the poor substitute of a probationary, government-issued privilege. For God’s sake, do the right thing.
Click to expand...

Interested to hear perspective of others on this forum...
 
Bravo said:
Powerful stuff:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10101409318132145&id=18414353&stream_ref=10

Heroism of Sergeant First Class Daniel Ferguson is especially notable, but point of Cook's letter is summed up in his concluding paragraph:



Interested to hear perspective of others on this forum...
Click to expand...

Restoring the "sacred" right won't prevent these kinds of events. It might deter some possible offenders, it might lessen the impact of the events that it doesn't deter, but it will not prevent them.
 
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I guess I never thought that Texas was a State that 'unreasonably' restricted people from having firearms. That said, I hate that this happened and honor those who suffered from the shooting. I'm not so sure everyone walking around with a sidearm is a good thing, but Lt Cooke mentioned (I think) that he had been an MP. Perhaps, because of his background, his having been armed may be worth consideration.
Farther up in the letter from Lt Cooke he writes about the shooting several years ago and the 'lessons not learned' by management. I wish he had elaborated on that. I'm not sure what those lesson were or what he feels should have been different, other than the notion to have more weapons around.
 
Boy things have have really changed from back in my day, if I had ever written a letter like that I would have gone from the Bridge to the Bilge with only a tooth brush and a dixie cup.

I feel pretty safe saying that I've never read anything in the Bible that says God gave the right to carry a gun.

It's hard to say whether allowing service members to carry weapons on base would prevent such an incident, all I can say is I saw far more people I was glad did not have a weapon then those that should.
 
Allowing soldiers to carry guns, government or private, on installations will create more problems and it will solve

We tend to take action(s) based on some incident without considering the consequences of these action(s). Thanks to the shoe bomber, we get to take off our shoes at the airport. Not sure inspecting our shoes made our air travel any safer. In contrast, there is no underwear check when we had a diaper bomber. How many small nail clippers were thrown into trash cans at the airport security check because they can used as weapon? Never mind there are many ordinary items that I can carry into an airplane and use as a weapon.

There are certain numbers of unstable soldiers that should not be in the military. If we provide easy access to weapons, that increases the chance of these soldiers harming others. We have to balance that against decreasing the chance of the next massacre. I think better mental health screening/support and better education on work place violence area better ways to prevent a future massacre than allowing soldiers to be armed.

I own several weapons.
 
Personally, I am a supporter of increased carry rights. I can legally carry a firearm going to the grocery store, but I'd become a criminal if I were to carry my pistol onto base. That doesn't make the most sense to me.

I'm not saying "Guns for everyone!" but I am of the personal opinion that those who take the time and energy to train with firearms and go through the process to legally carry them elsewhere should be able to get permission to carry on base.

From an active shooter incident perspective, the majority of mass shootings with four or more fatalities occur in places that are "Gun-free" by policy or force of law. Generally, most active shooters are seriously delayed or stopped when they first meet serious resistance (be that armed citizens, law enforcement, or five guys deciding they need to practice their rugby tackles).

From a nation-wide perspective, allowing more liberalized concealed-carry laws has not created more problems. Places that allow CCW do not tend to see rises in violent crime rates (often seeing decreases beyond national averages). Additionally, the licensed CCW population has shown itself to be quite law abiding (some state samples being convicted at a lower rate than the NYPD.)
 
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