America!
D'ja come yet?
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Alan: How very odd that "we" are discussing "keeping firearms out of military bases" but, elsewhere in America, assume everyone should have a gun everywhere else.
Despite Past Problems, Security Screening Spotty at Base
Fort Hood Does Little to Keep Out Firearms
KILLEEN, Tex. — The troubled Iraq war veteran who used a .45-caliber handgun to kill three people and wound 16 others on Wednesday at Fort Hood would not have had to pass through any security screening or metal detectors to enter, people familiar with procedures at the base said Thursday, an indication that nearly five years after the deadly shooting rampage there, it remained easy for a soldier and even a visitor to bring in a firearm.
Fort Hood’s weapons rules for soldiers who are not police officers rely in large part on the honor system.
The base’s rules prohibit soldiers from storing weapons in their vehicles, require firearms to be kept in certain storage areas and mandate that all personnel who bring a privately owned firearm onto the base in a vehicle state the reason for doing so. The carrying of privately owned weapons on Army installations is prohibited unless authorized by the senior commander. Violators face judicial or administrative penalties.
“The idea of doing a 100 percent check on a military installation with 50,000 people is frankly untenable,” Col. Steve Warren, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. “We do random checks.”
On Nov. 5, 2009, inside a medical processing building at Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian while wounding or shooting at 30 other soldiers and two police officers. He drove onto the base that day with a semiautomatic handgun and a .357-caliber revolver in his vehicle.
“I could travel on post with a weapon in my vehicle and nobody would know — but heck, you can do that walking into Starbucks,” said Major Hasan’s civilian lawyer, John P. Galligan, a former military judge at Fort Hood. “If it’s in the trunk of my car or under the seat, it’s not going to be caught, unless people want to start searching every car that goes in.”
According to a senior law enforcement official, the gun that the authorities found in the hands of Mr. Lopez — a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol — was bought at Guns Galore, the federally licensed gun dealer here in Killeen where Major Hasan bought at least one of the firearms he used in his 2009 rampage.
“The gun has a very big bullet — you can do a lot of damage with it,” the law enforcement official said. “It has one of the biggest bullets you can have in a pistol. It is very powerful.”
Hours after the shooting on Wednesday evening, federal agents went to Guns Galore to conduct an after-hours interview with the store manager, a spokesman for the store told reporters Thursday. He declined to discuss the details, citing the investigation.
After the 2009 attack, according to The Associated Press, the military tightened base security nationwide. That included issuing security personnel long-barreled weapons, adding an insider-attack scenario to their training, and strengthening ties to local law enforcement. The military also joined an F.B.I. intelligence-sharing program aimed at identifying terrorism threats. Reuters reported that Fort Hood had overhauled its security to better deal with potential “insider threats” after the Hasan attack.
Those security procedures were but one of several avenues of inquiry for Army officials and federal investigators looking into the shooting on Wednesday.
The base commander, Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, said at news conference Wednesday night that the response of military personnel to the shooting was swift and appropriate.
The authorities said Specialist Lopez appeared to have walked into one building, then gone inside a vehicle and fired shots from it with the Smith & Wesson pistol. He got out of the vehicle, walked into another building and opened fire again, then engaged with a military police officer before shooting himself.
He put his hands up, General Milley said, then reached under his jacket. The officer pulled out her weapon, and Specialist Lopez put his weapon to his head and fired. General Milley described the officer’s actions as “clearly heroic.”
“She did her job,” he said. “She did exactly what we would expect of U.S. Army military police.”
Last month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered new security procedures at the Pentagon and at American military bases in response to a shooting in which 12 people were killed at the Washington Navy Yard in September.
The Defense Department review of the Navy Yard attack concluded that the deaths could have been prevented if the Navy had properly evaluated and reported alarming behavior by the gunman, Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist. In discussing that shooting, Mr. Hagel said that an independent review had found that threats to military men and women were increasingly coming from within, including from colleagues with security clearances.
The independent review called the overall security process at Pentagon installations outdated, with too much focus on keeping a secure perimeter against outside threats and not enough on examining the potential threats from people granted clearance to enter the installations. The review recommended that the Pentagon examine the number of people with security clearances and consider revoking at least 10 percent of them.
Mr. Hagel said the reviews had found “troubling gaps” in the Defense Department’s “ability to detect, prevent and respond to instances where someone working for us — a government employee, member of our military, or a contractor — decides to inflict harm on this institution and its people.”
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