Governors Authorize National Guard to be Armed After Chattanooga Attack

I think they should be allowed to carry so long as they are not going out of their way to place themselves into a situation they should not be in. When you start involving military members in these situation you start running into jurisdictional issues between local / state police and military criminal investigation divisions.

While Posse Comitatus only applies to active duty federal military personnel it does not apply to state guard units, allowing them to engage in civilian law enforcement functions on order of the state governor. It only takes an act of the Federal Congress to remove that act, allowing full time federal military the ability to engage in police functions.

The only way for the Feds to federalize national guard troops would require the President to declare the state / City in question to be in active rebellion. This was one of the issues Bush faced with hurricane Katrina and the lack of leadership on the part of the Louisiana governor at the time. She refused to place state units under federal control (as is her right as commander in chief of the Louisiana guard). Bush was told the only way to force it would be to declare the state in active rebellion, which he opted not to do.

Arm them.. Give them the ability to protect themselves and the oath they took. There needs to be strict guidelines though to prevent military creep into the realm of civilian law enforcement.

Since the governors won't listen to the generals (or to President George HW Bush's Assistant Secretary of Defense, who signed a directive in 1992 limiting the number of armed personnel on base), I have a simple solution:

Simply poll United States military sergeants and see if they think arming all base personnel is the right move.

Don't forget that now a terrorist doesn't even have to buy a gun and try to get it on base; s/he can simply sign in as an unarmed visitor and grab the nearest loaded piece.

Like I say--ask the sergeants. They have the pulse of the base, and what is probably the best understanding of how to make things run smoothly and safely on a day to day basis.

Beyond the issue of base safety, we have WI Gov. Scott Walker blathering that one point of arming National Guard personnel at home is to "keep the community safer." A large majority of Guard troops have never had anything beyond Basic Training level arms experience (think summer camp pottery class). Even more frightening is that this yokel thinks policing a civilian community safely is something "anyone with a gun" can do, when in fact if even a seasoned infantryman were to come home and be a policeman, he would have to go through long, long training in the very different skills required.

Let's not even get into the concept of the subset of servicemen, now wracked with PTSD, being shoved into American towns with zero retraining as to how to stop reacting as if they're in Iraq shooting anything that moves.

But, you know, whatever makes you look cool to the millions of voters who've never set foot on a base or been thrown into a wall by a thankfully-unarmed fellow drunken airman, lol. They'd better damn well make an exception for Basic Training flights, where instructors' and recruits' tempers flare regularly and often.

And ANYONE who suggests arming recruiters has never met one

originally posted by: Shamrock6
Just saw this on a crawler on TV.

In the last 36 hours governors in as many as six states have authorized National Guard recruiters to be armed in their offices.

The state's are Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Florida and (sorry to anybody looking to tie it into Jade helm) Indiana.

Knee jerk reaction? Long overdue? Neither, but a good/bad idea anyway? Personally I like it. At a minimum it provides a sort of "guardian angel" for the offices and affords them at least some measure of protection.

www.nbcnews.com...

Long overdue, if you ask me. Our military people should be able to be armed, considering all of the attacks on our own soil in recent years. This is a good start.