At Townhall.com: If Civilians Can Be Trusted With Guns, Military Personnel Should Be Too

The CPRC’s Nikki Goeser and John Lott have a piece at Townhall about whether military personnel can carry guns on military bases in the US.

With the shootings over the last week at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida and at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii, people are again asking why military personnel are banned from having guns on military bases in the U.S. 

These attacks have become an all too familiar pattern of attacks at U.S. bases: the two Fort Hood shootings, the 2015 Chattanooga and 2009 Little Rock military recruitment center shootings, the 2013 Navy Yard complex in Washington, D.C., the 2013 Norfolk Navy base shooting, as well as other cases.

The irony is that our troops have been mandated to have their guns with them at virtually all times when they have been overseas at bases in Afghanistan or Iraq, but somehow those same troops are not trusted with guns when they come back to the U.S. 

Good soldiers — like law-abiding citizens — obey the rules against carrying guns. But instead of making places safer, disarming them leaves them sitting ducks. Those who want to do harm seek out venues where they don’t have to worry about victims defending themselves. Since at least 1950, 94 percent of the mass public shootings have taken place where citizens are banned from carrying guns.

The hero in the Naval Air Station Pensacola attack was Naval Academy graduate Joshua Watson, 23. Watson was shot at least five times by a Saudi national but still made it outside to alert the First Response team to the shooter’s identity and location. Watson was qualified as an Expert Marksman with small arms. He even trained others at the US Naval Academy on how to use firearms.

Now Watson’s family told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that they believe the situation would have turned out differently had their son been allowed to have a service weapon on the base. One of the authors here — Nikki Goeser — knows exactly how they feel and talks about it in her new book, as her husband was murdered by her stalker in front of her in a gun-free zone. 

The rules governing the Pensacola base were both typical and explicit: “First, state issued ‘concealed weapons permits’ are not recognized on any Navy installation” and that “personal firearms may only be stored in the installation’s armory.” . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.