As soon as I heard about the Navy Yard shooting in Washington D.C. this week I was sickened and appalled. I lived in that neighborhood for over a decade, and coming from a military family, I used venture on to Navy Yard a few times a month to do my banking at the Navy Federal Credit Union branch. I remain very fond my former Capitol Hill stomping grounds and my heart goes out to all my former neighbors who experienced the horrifying and tragic event. I also salute the police and first responders who risked their life to help the victims and subdue an armed madman.
Still, I am very troubled by the revelation that “for more than 30 agonizing minutes, Aaron Alexis stalked his human prey with a 12-gauge shotgun, eluding several attempts by law enforcement officers to gun him down.” That seems like an unacceptably long time, considering that Washington D.C. has some 34 different law enforcement agencies that could have been mobilized. And in particular, I’m troubled by the question: Why didn’t they send in the Marines?
The Marine Corps Barracks in D.C. are located at 8th and I, SE, about four blocks from the Navy Yard. It’s entirely possible that Marines, on foot, could have been at the scene as fast or faster than the police, but it turns out they were unarmed. The Media Research Center interviewed a man on Tuesday who told them, “My son was at Marine Barracks — at the Navy Yard yesterday – and they had weapons with them, but they didn’t have ammunition. And they said, ‘We were trained, and if we had the ammunition, we could’ve cleared that building.’ Only three people had been shot at that time, and they could’ve stopped the rest of it.”
Maybe that’s an optimistic assessment, but there’s no doubt that dozens of armed Marines fanning the streets would have very likely resulted in apprehending Aaron Alexis in significantly less than 30 minutes, saving lives in the process. So why don’t Marines and soldiers have access to munitions in the event of an emergency?
I asked a former member of the Marine Corps Rifle and Pistol team at Camp Pendleton, Lt. Col. John W. Hemingway USMC Ret., a.k.a. “dad,” for some historical perspective on the issue. It turns out he spent nearly his entire career when he was on base armed, with his government-issued sidearm in his desk and easy access to a loaded clip. Rank and file Marines had their rifles within reach, locked under their bunk. Now my father retired from the Marine Corps over 30 years ago and then, as now, most Marines were not given ammunition on base. But my father assures me that it would not have been a problem to distribute ammunition quickly in the event of an emergency.
However, a 1993 law, passed just a few months after Clinton took office, forbade servicemen from carrying weapons for personal protection on military bases. Typically the only people on military bases that are armed are MPs. We ought to be reassessing the wisdom of this policy — the Navy Yard shooting is not the first time more armed military personnel might have saved the day. When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on his shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009, he was taken down by a civilian police officer who happened to be present. A terrorist opened fire in a room full of soldiers and, incredibly, not one of them was armed.
Now there are obvious reasons why it’s a bad idea to let thousands of soldiers in close proximity on a military base all walk around armed. But it’s even more inexplicable that almost no one on a military base has access to guns. Certainly, soldiers of a certain rank or those noted to have exceptional proficiency with firearms could be allowed to carry or have access to loaded weapons. And in the event of, say, a shooting rampage there should absolutely be plans to quickly distribute guns — with bullets! — to large numbers of soldiers or Marines so they can sweep the area and neutralize the threat. The fact that the Marines at the 8th and I barracks weren’t able to quickly respond doesn’t augur well for responding to even bigger threats than a lone gunman. The United States Capitol is only eight blocks away. What if there was a coordinated terrorist attack? Are we to expect that we couldn’t count on the Marines to respond to that kind of attack quickly?
We spend billions of dollars training our soldiers and Marines to accurately fire and safely handle guns. And in recent years the military has placed a great emphasis on teaching urban combat tactics that require our soldiers to fight in areas where there are large numbers of civilians present. (Fallujah, anyone?) The military should never be deployed for domestic law enforcement purposes, but in the event of a killing spree or other serious public emergency landing on their doorstep, we damn well ought to be able to count on our rough men being ready when we need them.
