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From comments in another thread, regarding, "But the commanders know better than you, and don't want troops armed when they have no need of a weapon":

Retired military. My service is a matter of public record on my site, Wikipedia, and the dozens of people on Baen's Bar who've met me personally.

A rational person would observe that the military members at WNY did, in fact, need weapons this morning, and did not have them.

Will there be potential incidents if troops are armed all the time? Likely. Those have to be balanced against ongoing, increasing threats.

It seems unlikely there'd be more violence at a stateside base, than in the war zone where everyone is under severe stress. The number of incidents there is few. So we can expect there to be fewer here.

There could be some incidents of weapon loss or theft, but the cost/benefit analysis makes those really unimportant overall. They'd be less significant than losses from police evidence lockers.

Keep in mind all those troops and personnel are unarmed from home to duty and back again. A simple surveillance will provide all kinds of terror targets, as was done in Europe during the Cold War.

Also, it is impossible to secure against such threats. You cannot disassemble and cavity search every vehicle and person entering. Any response must contain a reactive component. A reactive component requires armed force in the immediate area to the hostile.

If only the military could find a large number of people trained with weapons to be on hand to respond...

"But Mike, we've kept making ourselves more and more helpless, and we're still getting attacked!  What can we do?"

"Stop being pussies."

Sarcasm aside, if you can't trust an officer or NCO with a sidearm, as every Barney Fife cop in America is trusted, then either we need better recruiting standards, or you need therapy. I'm betting on the latter.

If there were statistically an armed NCO in every duty section, there'd be a lot less of this, because the shooters don't want to die until AFTER the make their statement.

Consider also that anyone working on base, or living off base, is guaranteed to be defenseless from home to gate and back.  Easy pickings for some future terrorist (and this is an easy prediction, because it happened several times in Europe during the Cold War).

An "Armed Force" actually needs to be, you know, an ARMED FORCE.