Hegseth Orders Military Bases to Presume Approval for Personal Firearm Carry

Service members requesting permission to carry personal firearms at U.S. military installations will now receive approval by default, under a memorandum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed Thursday that reverses nearly 34 years of Pentagon firearms policy.

Hegseth announced the change in a video posted to social platform X and simultaneously signed the memo, formally titled "Non-Official Personal Protection Arming on Department of War Property." The full text was not released publicly as of Thursday evening, though the Department of Defense posted a summary on its website.

The memo directs installation commanders to apply a "presumption of approval" to any service member's request to carry a privately owned firearm for personal protection while in a non-official, off-duty capacity on base. Any denial must now be issued in writing and explain, in detail, the objective and individualized basis for rejecting the request. The policy applies regardless of the firearm laws in the state where a base is located.

Hegseth framed the shift on both constitutional and operational grounds. "Effectively, our bases across the country were gun-free zones," he said. "Unless you're training or unless you are a military policeman, you couldn't carry, you couldn't bring your own firearm for your own personal protection onto post." He also argued the threat is not exclusively external: "Not all enemies are foreign, nor are they all outside our borders. Some are domestic." On response time, he added: "In these instances, minutes are a lifetime. And our service members have the courage and training to make those precious, short minutes count."

To justify the change, Hegseth pointed to on-base shootings at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, and Fort Stewart in Georgia. The 2019 NAS Pensacola attack, in which a Saudi Air Force officer motivated by Islamist jihadist ideology killed three sailors and injured eight others, was labeled an act of terrorism by the FBI. The deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military base remains the November 5, 2009, Fort Hood attack, where Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 at a deployment processing center. Hasan was convicted at court-martial and sentenced to death; he remains on death row. A second Fort Hood shooting on April 2, 2014, killed three soldiers and wounded 14 others before Army Specialist Ivan Lopez-Lopez died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The policy carries notable limitations. It does not permit concealed carry inside installation buildings. At the Pentagon specifically, personnel may only store a privately owned firearm in a vehicle on the Pentagon Reservation; carry inside the building remains prohibited. The memo also extends a presumption-of-approval standard to the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. As of Thursday, the directives appeared to apply only to uniformed active-duty military personnel, leaving questions about civilian employees and contractors unanswered.

The policy Hegseth reversed traces to DoD Directive 5210.56, signed February 25, 1992, by Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood under President George H.W. Bush, a fact frequently misattributed to the Clinton administration because the Army formally implemented it through Army Regulation 190-14 in March 1993. Hegseth's legal authority for the change rests on Section 526 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016.

Reaction divided sharply. Second Amendment activist Andrew Pollack wrote on X: "This is awesome! Thank you for restoring the lost Second Amendment rights of our servicemen and women!" Brady United Against Gun Violence senior counsel Tanya Schardt countered that Defense Department leaders and the military's top brass have historically opposed relaxing the carry policy. Former CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr raised a pointed concern on X, writing that Hegseth "might be interested in some of the military concerns about the relationship between having personal weapons on base and suicide rates." Unresolved questions about how a broader armed population will interact with base security forces during active-threat scenarios remained a central worry among defense analysts.