Gotcha. Hopefully the various commanders will think about Ft. Hood and move toward force (individual) protection and not go the other direction even further.

I agree completely about it being within his lawful authority, I just wanted to reassure some people who I think were getting concerned that “our troops are defenseless at home” because of an order their commander has given to cover himself politically in case of some kind of incident. There are lots of orders governing off-duty personal behavior that are out there that, while having the full force of law behind them, are paid no more heed than an a dentist’s admonishment to use dental floss every time you brush. I think a “no-CCW” or ban on personal weapons at home policy would fall into that category.

Boat Guy-

That “Uniformed Services” thing bugs me as well. The Post Office wear uniforms and provide a service, do they fall under that heading as well?

Under what court would the Base Commander’s order be litigated? It can be complained about via the chain of command and the BC can decide to rescind it or it could be countermanded by a superior but there isn’t a court with the authority to “overrule” it that I’m aware of.

FTNuke,

The fact that you are unlikely to be caught doesn’t make it okay to be violated nor does it make it empty of authority, like you say, by that line of reasoning no law has any effectiveness. Hell, the prohibition on sleeping on watch only “matters” if someone catches you.

The Commander has as much power as he wants to exert unless someone up the chain reins him in. If he wanted to he could go out in town, find an off-duty soldier and order them to return to base with him. At the gate that soldier could be searched and a CCW discovered.

Obviously that isn’t likely to occur and I’m sure the Mothers of America would get their Senator’s and Rep’s on the horn to raise hell up and down the chain, but that is fully within a BC’s lawful authority. I don’t disagree that the carry ban is a stupid rule (though it came into effect because wanna-be gang banger idiot soldiers were fighting with and sometimes shooting at civilians).

Anyway, Happy Veteran’s Day to all.

Amen to that! It’s all destroying the rest of America, too, as far as I’m concerned.

I was in the military pre-9/11, and back then, all of my instructors in basic training used the term “raghead” on a regular basis to refer to our potential combat adversaries in the middle east. As far as I know, nobody ever made any sort of fuss over the usage of this terminology.

I’ll bet that the basic training instructors of today’s military sure as sugar cannot use such terminology now though, that is, without somebody such as Major Hasan then filing a complaint against them. (Perhaps there has also even been a service-wide Pentagon memo to order everybody from using such terminology lest it offends anyone.)

Of course, this would have all been a while before Major Hasan then decided to just lock and load a FN Five-Seven with 30-round magazines and start slaughtering everybody whom he thought did not have the same sympathies as he did towards certain adherents of a “religion of peace.”

Of course, these same certain adherents of a “religion of peace” would also be the very ones who keep trying to find new and not-so-peaceful ways to murder non-adherents, all so that these certain adherents can then supposedly attain 72 virgins in the afterlife.

I have seen this claim made by several people on various sites ever since the shooting on Fort Hood, and I just have to address it. While it is true that a Base Commander can make a regulation regarding what his service members do outside of the gates, it is also largely irrelevant. This is because enforcement of those rules, whatever they may be, is basically impossible. Most prohibitions regarding off-base/post behavior exist solely to be an additional charge thrown at a service member if he gets in trouble for something, for example many bases will place certain clubs or bars on a restricted list, and then if someone gets in trouble at one of those establishments you charge them with disobeying a direct order in addition to whatever their actual crime was. However, with the exception of some training commands they almost never actually check to see if anyone is violating the rule by going and looking in the establishment. This makes having a “no CCW off-base” rule even more meaningless, the very nature of concealed carry means no one knows you are doing it. The only way the command would find out is if you were to be caught in some sort of unlawful activity while carrying, in which case you are already in trouble and the additional “violated a direct order” charge is really just icing on the cake.
I know this post sounds a little like an advocation of anarchy, as one could make the same argument for all laws (another discussion), but I am just trying to reassure people that even if some base commander for some reason wanted to make sure that all his personnel were defenseless in their own homes, his order would have the same effectiveness as the “no underage drinking” campaigns, which is to say none whatsoever.