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What do Fort Hood in Texas and the Hood in South Central Los Angeles have in common?

Concealed carry of firearms is legally prohibited in both Hoods.

California theoretically has a law to issue CCW licenses to civilians living in Los Angeles; in practice only court officers get them.

Under federal law, state-issued CCW licenses don’t apply on military bases, and concealed-carry of firearms is otherwise forbidden.

So, as hard as it is to believe, Fort Hood — a post-9/11 United States Army Base with the population of a small city — was almost as much of a gun-free zone as George Hennard’s October 16, 1991 free-fire zone in Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, or Gang Lu’s on the campus of the University of Iowa a couple of weeks later, or Colin Ferguson’s February 17, 1995 killing spree on the Long Island Railroad, or at Dunblane, Scotland March 13, 1996, or April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School, or April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech.

In all these locations guns were legally prohibited for self-defense by decent, law-abiding people. The indecent criminals who ignored the law were granted a monopoly on firepower. Disarmed victims died while awaiting the arrival of “first responders.”

It would be sweet for conservatives to blame the Obama or Clinton administrations for the absolute idiocy of disarming soldiers in the United States Army, but this policy was in effect during the eight years of the Bush-Cheney Administration — all but the first few months of that administration following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The most cutting wounds are always by the treachery of supposed friends.

Et tu, Dubya?

In my 1996 article on Dunblane, “A Rude Awakening” — included as a chapter in the 1999 second edition of my book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns — I wrote, “There are wild people among us who will not exercise self-restraint, and we must live with the expectation that at a time and place of their choosing, not of ours, they will explode upon us.”

Nothing has changed in the decade since I wrote those words except that by forbidding guns to everyone on four commercial jetliners on 9/11/2001 gangs armed only with box-cutters were easily able to commandeer those jets and convert them into high-explosive-laden cruise missiles which destroyed both the World Trade Center and a section of the Pentagon, with a body count that day of about 3,000, many more in two retaliatory wars that followed, and with hundreds of financial experts lost that day possibly the loss of the brains who could have prevented the economic meltdown of the United States.

For want of a handgun the United States might have been lost.

Now al-Qaeda has just been given yet another commercial for a Blue Light Special on terrorism: America is so opposed to reasonable self-defense — its rulers so afraid of their own taxpayers that they won’t even trust their own soldiers with guns — that even America’s homeland army bases are easy targets.

Excellent work, Nidal Malik Hasan. Allah will reward you for exposing the Great Satan’s unprotected underbelly to your compatriots.

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