More Deaths in Democrat Victim Disarmament Zones

The New York Times reports that there's been another massacre of disarmed American soldiers:

KILLEEN, Tex. - In the aftermath of a deadly rampage at Fort Hood here in November 2009 that left 13 people dead, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced a Pentagon review of the shooting to help ensure, he said, that "nothing like this ever happens again."

Nearly five years later, it did, in eerily similar fashion.

On Wednesday, when a troubled Iraq war veteran - Specialist Ivan Antonio Lopez, 34 - killed three people and wounded 16 others at Fort Hood before taking his own life, he did so in Army uniform after sneaking a high-powered handgun onto the base, just as the 2009 gunman had done.

The previous murder of unarmed soldiers occurred in 2009 when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan brought a gun onto the base and shot as many soldiers as he could to keep them from going to Afghanistan to kill his co-religionists.

There was another recent slaughter of unarmed military personnel near Washington DC when a contractor who may or may not have been deranged went on a shooting spree in yet another military facility.

These murderers may be crazy, but they aren't stupid.  Why shoot people on a military base?  Because President Clinton turned all our military facilities into victim disarmament zones, a favorite activity of members of the Democratic party:

Military personnel who are not police officers are not allowed to carry privately owned weapons on Army bases.

This misguided rule, Army Regulation 190-14, was put in place by President Clinton in 1993.  As Democrats are prone to do, he forbade military personnel from carrying weapons on military bases except when ordered to do so in the line of duty.

Presidents aren't the only Democrats who do this.  The City of Boston is so concerned that a female victim might hurt an attacker that they forbade women to carry pepper spray without a license.

Some Republicans have urged that this misguided regulation be overturned:

"Only the most out-of-touch radical would try to disarm soldiers," Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) noted in a press release. He urged House members Thursday to repeal the ban and support his "Safe Military Bases Act."

Democrats clearly like victim disarmament zones - they create so many of them.  Equally clearly, it has nothing to do with worries about the qualifications of the people disarmed - there is nobody more qualified to keep and bear arms than trained American soldiers, and there are few civilians more familiar with firearm safety than the soldiers' families.

Obviously, reality has nothing to do with the Democrat penchant for restricting or banning guns.  The desirability of banning guns is an article of faith immune to rational argument.  But then, with so many years' evidence of this and other delusions, that shouldn't be a surprise.