White House shooter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few years back a wackadoodle stood in front of the White House and opened fire with an AK or SKS.
When he attempted to reload,a man [ possibly military or reservist ] tackled him and took him out .
Until the guard got there to take him into custody.
the brave soul was unarmed [ after it is Washington ] and stated he was trying to become an LEO.
That was Harry Rakosky who was a former security guard who used to guard embassies under construction. Others quickly arrived to help hold down the shooter until law enforcement arrived.
http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-30/news/mn-18913_1_white-house
and the gun used apparently was a Chinese SKS.
SADLY,most active shooters take advantage of "gun free zones" and that precludes the possibility of most meeting a quick end to their carnage.
While they may benefit from it, there really doesn't seem to be a pattern indicating that the shooting locations were selected because they were gun free zones. Most commonly the locations are where the shooter had problems of some sort.
SimplyChad asks:
And what about ft.hood and bliss?
and Medwheeler responded:
What about them? I don't know about what incident at Bliss you're asking. At Hood, it was two civilian LEOs who brought down the shooter. Both were on duty, assigned under contract with the Army to provide LE services at the base, since a majority of the base's own MPs were deployed overseas. So, this doesn't count as an incident of civilian involvement for this thread.
Fort Bliss does not either. The 2010 shooting of 3 people by Craig Allen Graham killed one and wounded two. He too was arrested by responding police. The shooting wasn't actually on base, but at a club in central El Paso.
http://www.kvia.com/news/30224247/detail.html
Maybe you meant the case in 2010 when a gunman shot two at a convenience store on base before getting gunned down by police.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/20/shooting-fort-bliss-army-base/
Keep in mind (as I recently had to remind a colleague about "gun-free" zones) that soldiers on base here in the US are not armed. Except for the sidearms of MPs, their weapons are kept secured in the base armory. From what I recall, that was a Clinton-era decision included with one of his RIF policies.
Actually, soldiers being unarmed on base is nothing new and the practice goes back several decades. Clinton's influence was only in disallowing personal arms.
Not having guns and/or ammo was something of an issue on Dec 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Of the few guns on land, most had little or no ammunition. Most shipboard guns had no ammunition available either. By and large, ammo was securely stored in gun lockers/depots and ship magazines.
Apparently the night before most of the troops were due to leave Iwo Jima, most of their ammo and some guns were boxed up to be taken to the pickup ship. So when the banzai attack happened this night lots of the soldiers didn't had guns or ammo.
When the USS Cole was attacked, none of the guards on duty had ammunition for their guns. Even if they would have had it, they were under orders not to fire the first shot. So the bomb boat would still have completed its mission.
In the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the truck bomber crashed though barbed wire fence and drove past 2 guard stations where the guards would not allowed to have loaded weapons. They were carrying mags and ammo, but by the time they got their guns up and running, it was too late.
It's definitely a crying shame to picture many of America's finest warriors having to duck and cower like helpless animals because they were not permitted to be "at the ready."
Maybe so, but this isn't because of anything Clinton did. It is our military that doesn't trust its own soldiers enough to be armed with their duty weapons while on base.