Armed volunteers are showing up at military recruiting sites to protect unarmed recruiters after the recent shooting deaths of four Marines and a Navy sailor in Tennessee.
Ron Harris / AP
Across the U.S., armed volunteers are arriving at military recruiting centers to protect recruiters in the wake of a shooting spree last week in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where four Marines and one Navy sailor were killed.
A 1992 Department of Defense directive restricts weapons to law enforcement or military police on federal property. So when Mohammad Abdulazeez sprayed the facade of a Naval Recruiting Reserve Center from his convertible Mustang last week, recruiters had no way of firing back. It wasn't until Abdulazeez rammed the gate at the reserve center seven miles away that law enforcement was able to catch up to the 24-year-old and return fire, killing him.
"It's sad they can't protect themselves," veteran Mike Switalski told the Associated Press Tuesday as he sat outside a military recruitment center in Columbus, Ohio, with an AR-15 assault rifle. In many states, including Ohio, it is legal to carry and openly display a gun.
The Department of Defense on Monday issued a new directive allowing the U.S. military to increase surveillance and implement other measures to boost security at recruitment facilities.
Governors in multiple states across the country — including Ohio's John Kasich on Wednesday — have also authorized National Guard personnel to take up arms to protect recruiting sites.
But that hasn't stopped gun owners from setting up outside recruitment centers in states across the country, including Washington, Georgia, Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, West Virginia, and Tennessee.
Crystal Cole, armed with a loaded handgun, in front of an Army and Marines recruitment center in Hiram, Georgia.
Ron Harris / AP
On Tuesday, Stewart Rhodes, the founder and president of Oath Keepers — a Las Vegas-based veterans activist group — issued a call to members to guard recruitment centers, calling it "absolutely insane" that recruiters aren't allowed to be armed.
In the last six years, recruiting centers have been the target of two shootings — the one in Chattanooga last week, the other in 2009 in Little Rock, Arkansas, where one soldier was killed and another was injured.
"We're here to serve and protect," said Clint Janney, who wore a Taurus 9mm handgun as he stood near a recruiting center in Columbus. "What the government won't do, we will do."
Some of the armed citizens are part of private militias. Ohio's Franklin County Sheriff Zach Scott said volunteer guards are not violating any laws by hanging outside of the recruiting centers while armed.
However, employees and customers of a medical supply center adjacent to the Columbus recruiting center told the AP that the citizen guards were unsettling and posed a different kind of threat.
"They could just go crazy with the shooting," said Kimm McLaughlin, 44. "You just don't know their state of mind."
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