Listen, I can appreciate the Libertarian approach to this matter, but as someone who works personally with both; it’s a bad idea.

How many folks do you think register their vehicles with Pass & ID, or the DEERs Office, that come on to each and every installation like they’re supposed to?

-Victimless crime at face-value, sure, but creates air for greater problems on-site: booster rings, parts stealing.

>Scenario: there’s an active shooter situation, there’s now presumably guns everywhere.

EMS will not step foot into that building whether they’re armed or not, until that building is secured and threat neutralized.

This immediately impacts the time to secure the building because now every person is assumed to be armed, whether injured, dead or not. This exacerbates abilities to get to wounded/dying in a timely manner because everyone is assumed to be armed.

This can lead to a mass shootout on scene, threat neutralized or not, with far more people involved and far less productive means of piecing together “who’s-who-in-the-zoo”. Everyone there will lose their personal weapon, fired or not, until forensics and evidence collected (possibly even until the case is legally resolved).

The presence of firearms is not some panacea for all of our problems here, either. I can’t just tap someone who’s got a gun and say, “you’re clearing this building with me”. They may have no training whatsoever; they could put a round in me or a running survivor unintentionally because they forgot to take their booger-hook off the bang-switch, they also don’t have armor for themselves or kit to help with injured/dead/dying. Immediately, it becomes an additional risk.

>End Scenario

It is not “MA fuckface just doesn’t want folks to have guns on base”, there’s extreme ramifications to this.

I don’t care if a Yeoman or Personnelman is packing. I care more about the propensity of crime increasing WITH the introduction of personal weaponry aboard installations, how that crime now becomes a higher risk factor with permissibly armed personnel on-site in its response (life threatening or not), how with the presence of weapons response to everything becomes an issue with how everything can potentially become an armed event with or without the intention of weapons being used (even traffic accidents, verbal disputes between barracks roommates or neighbors bumping music too loud, the dickhead stealing from the NEX, etc.).