According to this AP story, at numerous Pensylvania and New York airports, National Guardsmen carry their weapons unloaded, with ammunition available from belt clips if necessary.
Apparently public officials are more afraid of accidental shootings by our own security, than curbing an armed attack by terrorists.
They may be right. Still, I remember that Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, where the guard at the gate also had an unloaded gun (whether he had ammo at ALL is something I don’t recall). Frankly, if I were a Guardsman, I would desert before going on such duty unarmed.
Are there any Guardspeople out there who’ve been assigned to disaster or riot duty? It strikes me that this may BE the SOP for the on-duty Guards. I was initially thinking that some orders would need to be issued to keep the guns unloaded, perhaps from the state governor’s office or from the local airport authority. Now I wonder whether special orders would need to be issued to ALLOW the troops to load their weapons.
I see the story says twelve states, including Georgia and (apparently) Maryland DO provide loaded carry. Good. Here in the territories, the Guardsmen at SJU are from the one of the PRNG’s MP Batallions, and those inside the concourses do not walk around swinging’ M16’s, but carry their Berettas at the hip, and those are loaded. Then again, being MP’s they are better trained in this kind of close-quarters law-enforcement type situations. They achieve their “visibility” objective by sticking out like sore thumbs in their sharply pressed BDU’s, shiny boots, web gear, MP brassard and black berets.
If the NY and PA guardsmen say it takes them too long to get to the ready, I’d say it may reflect a failure of their leaders to provide adequate mission training which may be why these leaders don’t want the weapons loaded in the first place. As the story says, soldiers carry the M16/M4’s magazines within reach in pockets clipped to their web gear. If you’re well trained and well practiced in it you can lock-and-load damn quick.
I read the story, too (it was on the front page of the local paper this morning), but couldn’t get myself too alarmed about it.
For one thing, as others have pointed out, it doesn’t take all that long to load a weapon from a belt clip.
For another, these folks were all guarding civilian airports. When my wife and kids are in a public area, I’d rather not have loaded weapons lying around, thank you. It’s just too easy for one to go off by accident, or as a result of a nervous reaction to an unusual situation - or because some Certifiably Bad Person snatched a weapon from a guard and started firing it. Frankly, I think the situation is safer if the weapons have to be loaded first and then fired. If/when a band of Certifiably Bad Guys attempts to take over an airport my guess is that most of the guardsmen would have plenty of time to lock and load as they’re running to the problem area.
Also, as far as I recall none of the guardsmen ever had reason to load their weapons during the interval we’re all talking about.
When my SO picked me up from the airport in Jacksonville, FL, he had quite nervously watched a Guardsman with a weapon slung over his back and his finger hooked thru the trigger guard. My SO is trained in the safe handling and use of firearms and thought he was out of his fscking mind.
With that in mind, this may not be such a bad idea, as long as they can slap a clip in and go to town if need be.
Actually, M16s do not take clips. They use magazines. Same with Beretta handguns.
I also think that Guardsmen who are supposedly performing security for airports look pretty damn stupid carrying around M16s with empty magazine wells.
I’ve been in two Guard units. The first was a highly proffessional group of military men made up of men who, with very few exceptions, were very good at their jobs. Right now those guys are somewhere overseas helping out with some of the current ugliness. I’d have no problem letting most of these guys walk around our nation’s airports locked and loaded.
Then there’s the second unit I was in. Everything I said about the first unit you can apply to the second in reverse. Going to the rifle range with these guys always made me feel a little anxiety. Any exercise that included the use of real bullets or explosives filled me with dread. I thank God this second Guard unit has nothing to do with the War on Terror or “Operation Airport Security Blanket.”
FWIW, the first unit was infantry and the second was engineers–both combat arms, both units that should be able to handle weapons with a great deal of skill. Both looked great on paper; unfortunately it’s a very different story in real life.
This is scary. Not that soldiers have unloaded weapons, but that so many people think it’s a good idea. The problem is, anyone who wanted to cause serious trouble in an airport would neutralize the guardsmen first. Don’t give them the chance to lock & load and then you can do whatever you want.
Actually, I rather doubt anyone who wanted to cause serious trouble in an airport is going to start by starting a shootout with Guardsmen or rentacops. My biggest worry my last couple of trips has been that it would happen something like this:
Terrorist would enter with a carry-on bag full of explosives, and detonate it right in the line slowly filtering through the security checkpoint–where the biggest mass of people are these days. Many people dead and injured, the airport will be physically shut down for at least a couple days, and if you thought people were afraid of flying before, hoo boy–and no matter if Guardsmen have loaded rifles or not (hell, if they had grenade launchers or not), it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in stopping that. Operation Airport Security Blanket is a very apt term.
Well, this may or may not be a hijack (ouch–no pun intended, I swear), but what kind of units are protecting our airports anyway? They can’t all be Military Police units, surely, although they’re probably be the closest thing we’ve got in relatively large numbers to units suited for the mission.
God, I hope we just didn’t pluck a bunch of people from whatever armories just happened to be closest to the airports in question. I’d hate to think that we’re being guarded by a bunch of cooks and intel weenies and fuel specialists.
And wouldn’t this really be a better job for Air Guard units instead of Army Guard units. I would think that the Air National Guard would have people trained specifically for airport security, just as the regular Air Force does. Right? Any USAF/USAFR/USAirNG vets out there?
Regardless of who’s guarding the airports, an Incident, I suspect, will quickly turn into mass chaos since I doubt that the real cops, the rent-a-cops, the national guardsmen, the various airport employees, the various airport customers, and whatever people from various other law-enforcement agencies with an airport presence (Customs, for example) will be able to do anything on the same sheet of music.
Didnt the national guard have to get the governor of ca’s permission or soemthing like that for supplying ammunition during the la riots or soemthing like that ?
I remeber by the time they got it all together the riot was just about over
There was a lot of talk about streamlinging the system for a bit afterwards
On behalf of the eighty-plus percent of the armed forces that are not in the combat arms, I would like to say, “Go fuck yourself.”
I am a military personnel officer. I sit in an office all day and process paperwork. I go to the firing range at least twice a year, more if I get the chance, where I last qualified as an Expert with the 9mm pistol. I have been deployed to Macedonia and Kosovo, where I took a turn as the guard commander.
I have never fired a shot in anger. With a little luck, I’ll never have to. However, I am trained, prepared and ready to do so. As are the cooks, intel weenies and fuel specialists you so casually deride.
And so, again I say, “Go fuck yourself.” And after doing so, thank the cooks, intel weenies and fuel specialists who are in Afghanistan and other hostile areas doing their part to defend freedom while you sit on your ass and snipe at them.
Short version – clips go into magazines. There’s some crossover, but basically, a clip of ammo is designed to feed quickly into the magazine, which then goes into the weapon.
This is what you get when you’ve got every-other-weekend warriors out there who know how to aim a gun but not when to aim it. stankow, if you think beating your chest about how you go to the firing range once every six months gives you the judgement and training that police officers spend their whole lives cultivating, then all I can say is thank God you’re not in my airport. You know how to fire a gun, certainly, but you know what they say about how when the only tool you have handy is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail . . .
Count me in the “glad they’re unloaded” camp. And if the question comes up, count me in the “feels the whole thing is ridiculous” camp as well.
And to clarify further: in the case we’re discussing, “magazine” is the removable spring-loaded elongated boxy thing that holds and feeds the rounds, which you shove into the grip of the pistol or the lower receiver of the assault rifle to load.
In the days of the M1 Garand rifles, the magazine was fixed(built-in or screwed-in), so you did use the clip to load the weapon.
Civilians tend to refer to magazines as “clips”, indistinctly.
A soldier on the line carries loaded magazines in pockets attached to his/er web gear (belt).
And when you have Kent State, every National Guardsman starts to look like a murderer. Thanks ever so for painting them all with that thirty-year-old brush.
What in my post gave you even the slightest inkling of an idea that I think that I, or any other soldier, have the same level of when-to-fire judgment that police officers have?
However, since we didn’t happen to have thousands of reserve police officers available to patrol airports, we used the National Guard. And when Mephisto dismissed them all as a bunch of people from whatever armories just happened to be closest to the airports in question and a bunch of cooks and intel weenies and fuel specialists, well, that pissed me off. If you think that constitutes “beating my chest,” fine. But at least get straight what it is I’m beating my chest about.
Go fuck myself? That’s not very nice. Whatever happened to debating the post and not attacking the poster? Well, anyway . . .
Congratulations on scoring Expert with your pistol twice a year, but what has that got to do with anything? I’ve gone to the range and killed hundreds of imaginary bad guys over the years and I don’t think that qualifies me to be the person protecting our airports from terrorists and assorted other nogoodniks.
Sorry you think that I casually derided all those cooks, intel weenies, and fuel specialists. I simply said that I hope they’re not guarding our airports. Because I’d hate to think that they are. Because they’re not qualified to do so. IMHO anyway. What inspired that comment was the fact that the government sometimes does things that seem, well, a little bit crazy.
I don’t think you should dismiss me as somebody who sits on his ass in a “discussion” that involves service to one’s country; you really don’t know that much about me.
I never said that combat arms soldiers were in some fundamental way better than 80% of the rest of the military (I have no idea if that statistic is correct). I simply tried to point out that one would think that combat arms soldiers would be better at using weapons–-after all, fighting is their raison d’etre, right? And then I said that the combat arms soldier’s superiority with weapons–-which is something that should be a fact–-is really sometimes a myth.
I never dismissed the soldiers protecting this nation’s airports as anything at all. I did ask if anybody knew what kind of soldiers they were. And of course I said what I hoped they weren’t, which evidently pissed you off–-but I’ve already covered that in this post.
Anyway, sorry you got pissed off. Please don’t attack me again, though. Have a nice day.
I can accept that you intended no offense, despite your use of the word “weenies.” I overreacted slightly. For that, I apologize.
However, your logic is still faulty. Of the seven combat arms branches in the U.S. Army, only one routinely uses a direct-fire personally carried weapon for the commission of their combat duties – infantrymen. Even then, they use them in a massed, coherent fashion as part of a unit, not as building guards. What would make a Patriot battery crewmember any better an airport guard than the guy who repairs the power plant on that Patriot?
As you said, MPs are the best choice. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone else in the National Guard is incapable of performing the mission of providing another layer of security and overwatch at the airports.
