Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday directed military commanders to allow troops to carry personal firearms while stationed at bases, an effort to end longstanding restrictions at military installations.
Members of the military are typically barred from being armed while on base grounds, unless they are on guard duty or training. Military police officers are allowed to carry firearms.
Mr. Hegseth cited a series of mass shootings at military bases to justify the order, saying that troops should be able to carry firearms at all times in order to protect themselves from potential attackers.
He also characterized the current restrictions as creating “gun-free zones” on U.S. military bases, equating them to laws that liberal states and cities had passed restricting people from carrying guns in sensitive areas.
Mr. Hegseth’s order waded into a complicated and fraught decades-long effort by the military to effectively deter and prevent shootings at military bases, particularly those committed by U.S. troops who had no clear indicators of violent behavior.
Many of those shootings have involved troops bringing their personal guns onto base grounds and opening fire on fellow service members. Mr. Hegseth cited a shooting at Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia last year as a reason to encourage troops to carry their own weapons.
In that incident, Sgt. Quornelius Radford used a personal handgun to shoot members of his supply unit, prosecutors said, injuring four soldiers and a civilian worker.
Other high-profile mass shootings, including some of the deadliest on military bases, have involved guns that troops purchased privately and then brought onto base grounds.
In 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 12 soldiers and one civilian — the deadliest such massacre at a military base. The Pentagon quickly ordered sweeping new restrictions requiring that personal firearms be registered with the base and receive approval from unit commanders.
But four years later, another shooting happened at the same base under the new rules. In April 2014, Army Specialist Ivan A. Lopez bought a handgun from the gun store where Major Hasan acquired his pistol, then killed three soldiers and wounded 12 others. Specialist Lopez had not registered his firearm, and brought it with him onto base grounds.
The shootings reflect the complications of banning private weapons from places where military personnel train. and the difficulties of monitoring a population whose members are often dealing with high levels of stress.
To ensure that no unauthorized weapon ends up on a base, military installations would need to be outfitted with Transportation Security Administration-style screening — a level of security and cost that military officials are unlikely to embrace.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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