Hegseth announces military members can carry personal firearms on US bases
Active-duty service members and other Department of Defense personnel will soon be able to carry their privately owned firearms for personal protection on domestic military installations. It’s a move that gun control advocates say top military brass have opposed for years.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that he’d signed a memorandum allowing a qualifying individual to request to carry their own firearms while in their nonofficial duty capacity on some Department of Defense property within the country.
“It was virtually impossible … for War Department personnel to get permission to carry and store their own personal weapons aligned with the state laws where we operate our installations,” Hegseth said in a post to X. “Well, that’s no longer.”
He said any service member who is denied permission to carry a personal firearm on base would be owed a written explanation for the denial. Hegseth didn’t elaborate on what reason a soldier would have for being denied.
Gun control supporters have advocated for mandatory training before civilians would be allowed to own or carry a firearm. Hegseth said active-duty military members are trained at “the highest and unwavering standards.”
“These warfighters, entrusted with the safety of our nation, are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American,” Hegseth said.
The memorandum doesn’t allow personnel to carry firearms in certain areas of high national security, such as the Pentagon.
Previous attacks at military bases
Hegseth’s announcement comes 12 years to the day since Army Specialist Ivan Lopez killed three and wounded 16 more before taking his own life. It was the second mass shooting at Fort Hood in five years. In 2009, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan killed 13 people, as well as an unborn child, and shot 32 more before he was subdued.
More recently, Army Sgt. Quornelius Radford pleaded guilty last month to attempted murder charges after he shot five soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in August 2025. And in 2026, a veteran fatally shot herself, and injured another person, at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Gun violence prevention community questions memorandum
Brady: United Against Gun Violence, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control, opposes Hegseth’s change, saying senior military officials have pushed back against loosening the restriction for years.
“Our military installations are among the most guarded, protected properties in the world, and they’ve never been ‘gun-free zones,’” Tanya Schardt, Brady senior counsel, said in a statement to Straight Arrow News. “If there is a problem with violent crime on these installations, then the Secretary of Defense has an obligation to alert the American people and describe how he’s working to prevent that crime.”
Brady pointed to a 2022 study that found 90% of military suicides involved personally owned weapons, while only 10% used military-issued weapons.
Support from the Second Amendment community
The Second Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that litigates firearms lawsuits, said Hegseth’s memorandum changes a “dangerous policy.”
“SAF believes any ‘gun-free zones’ are constitutionally questionable, and also create soft targets that are enticing to criminals and others bent on violence,” said Kostas Moros, SAF’s director of legal research and education. “The fact that military bases, of all places, have been under such restrictions has long been perplexing to us.”
Moros added that a soldier serving their country should not be required to abandon their Second Amendment right to armed self-defense.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
