Walker OKs guns for Wisconsin guard

Associated Press

MADISON, Wis.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker issued an executive order Tuesday authorizing Wisconsin National Guard personnel to carry firearms while on duty in the wake of an attack on a pair of military facilities in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The governor’s order directed Maj. Gen. Don Dunbar, who oversees the Wisconsin National Guard, to arm guard personnel “as reasonably necessary.” Walker also said in a news release that he ordered Dunbar to review the long-term security plans for all of the guard’s facilities.

“Safety must be our top priority, especially in light of the horrific attack in Chattanooga,” Walker said in the release.

Dunbar immediately ordered the posting of armed guardsmen at the guard’s four storefront recruiting stations in Eau Claire, La Crosse, Madison and Milwaukee, said Maj. Paul Rickert, the guard’s spokesman. Visitors to those locations should be prepared to have their bags searched, Rickert said. The guard began a security review Monday evening after learning the order was about to come down, he added.

Walker’s order comes after a gunman killed four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor at two Chattanooga military facilities Thursday. Authorities say the shooter was 24-year-old Muhammed Youssef Abdulazeez, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Kuwait. Police killed him.

Abdulazeez’s motives remain unclear, although authorities are treating it as a domestic terrorism investigation.

Walker’s order would not affect non-Wisconsin National Guard military offices in the state, which are federally run.

Walker, who is seeking the 2016 presidential nomination, called Friday for an end to a ban on service members’ carrying guns in federally operated military recruiting offices. Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, two other Republicans seeking the presidential nomination, called for an end to the ban on the same day as Walker.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, yet another GOP presidential hopeful, issued an executive order Friday authorizing his state’s National Guard leader to arm personnel. A number of other governors have issued similar orders as well.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump pushed back ever harder Tuesday against Republicans fed up with his provocations, disclosing one opponent’s cell number in a fiery speech and lashing out at an influential newspaper as part of an in-your-face escalation of the feud.

Fellow GOP presidential contender Sen. Lindsey Graham called him a “jackass,” only to see floods of Trump supporters jam his phone line after Trump read Graham’s number to an audience.

Trump is now at odds with much of the Republican establishment after a series of incendiary comments, topped by his weekend mocking of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s experience as a tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Since then the real-estate developer and reality-TV host has intensified his criticism of McCain and his record on veterans issues in the Senate, even as politicians from both parties and veterans groups have rushed to McCain’s defense.

In a speech to hundreds of supporters in Bluffton, S.C., on Tuesday, Trump kept on McCain, accusing him of being soft on illegal immigration.

“He’s totally about open borders and all this stuff,” Trump said.

Elsewhere in South Carolina on Tuesday, one of his rivals, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, walked a fine line on Trump, criticizing his fellow candidate’s rhetoric on immigration and McCain but saying Trump’s supporters are “good people” with “legitimate concerns.”

An editorial in The Des Moines Register, in early-voting Iowa, urged him to “pull the plug on his bloviating side show” and quit the race.