“Uncle Sam will issue you an M4 in Baghdad but lock your compound bow in an arms room back home.”
Once upon a time, every Army post had a Rod & Gun Club. Soldiers swapped stories over clays and venison stew, learned real firearm safety, and taught their kids what stewardship and discipline looked like. The firing line wasn’t political; it was practical. It built better Soldiers, shooters, better conservationists, and frankly, better Americans.
Fast-forward 30-years and you can’t even sight-in your deer rifle on post without filing a safety plan, an environmental worksheet, and a liability waiver longer than War and Peace. The same institution that trusts a 19-year-old private with belt-fed fire won’t trust him with a 12-gauge and two boxes of birdshot on his day off.
The excuses are legendary: Force Protection. Environmental compliance. Lead remediation. Noise complaints. In plain English, that means “we don’t trust our own people.” Every year the red tape gets thicker, the gates get tighter, and the Rod & Gun signs come down one by one.
Meanwhile, deer populations explode on post because it’s so painful to hunt them. So what does Big Army do? Pays a civilian contractor to show up with suppressed rifles and “humanely harvest” them under night vision. Translation: taxpayer-funded sharpshooters to replace soldiers who would’ve done it for free—and loved every minute of it.
It’s not about safety anymore. It’s about optics, risk avoidance, and bureaucratic self-preservation. The only shots most installations take now are mandatory flu shots.
The truth is ugly but simple: the Department of Defense divested itself of its outdoors heritage the same way it divests everything else—by regulating it to death. And when the last trap house rots and the last hunting license expires, the brass will call it a “policy and security success.”
So yeah—Uncle Sam doesn’t trust his own anymore. But, he still wants you to fight for freedom; he just doesn’t want you to enjoy it.
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