Fifty nervous heads, fifty loaded machine guns

Way back during the Viet Nam war,  I was assigned to a jet fighter wing in Thailand.  We were bombing North Viet Nam twice a day.  We had a poorly defended air base, lacking even a perimeter fence and about 5000 young airmen on base.  Some young troop wrote a letter to his Congressman saying "Here I am in a combat zone, and the Air Force won't let me have a gun."   In those days, Congressman spoke loudly AND carried a big stick, and so orders came down from AF HQ requiring every unit on the base to draw enough M16's out of base supply to arm every man in the unit.  More orders from the base commander, requiring each unit to build an arms room and keep the M16's locked up therein.  I remember taking the squadron pickup truck up to Base Supply and loading 400 brand new M16's, still in cartons, and 1200 new magazines, all full of ammo, and driving back to squadron headquarters,  feeling VERY well armed.  Meanwhile the men had built gun racks out of Dexion, and a gun room out of 3/4 inch plywood, and all the guns were safely locked inside. 
   And they stayed locked up for the rest of my tour at Korat Royal Thai Air Base.  And a good thing too.  I can still visualize the scene if we had been attacked and issued all those guns.  It would happen after dark, of course.  The troops would take shelter in the numerous sand bag bunkers we had in case of attack.  In each bunker you have fifty nervous troops, fifty nervous heads sticking up and looking all around, and fifty loaded machine guns.  These were the old style fully automatic M16s, pull the trigger and BRAP, 20 rounds are gone.  Sooner or later, someone's gun would go off, he forgets to put the safety on, he drops it, he's fiddling with it.  BRAP.  Over in the next bunker,  they hear the firing.  Someone shouts "They're over there, let 'em have it."  BRAP.  Someone else shouts, "They're shooting at us from over there."  BRAP.  I figure firing would continue until the last round was expended.  Should I have survived that night, the next morning would have been bad.  Bullet holes everywhere.  All the aircraft shot up.  All the hootchs full of holes.
  Fortunately it never happened, but it could have.
  So, when I hear that the military forbids the troops from carrying guns on base, I can understand where they are coming from.