The Few, the Proud, the Untrusted?

[Prokne]

As was already stated, they DON'T march with active loaded firearms. Their normal "dress M1's" are inoperable, they cannot be fired, but they possess all the characteristics of the firearm otherwise (in that the bolt works, the trigger works, it just lacks some parts required to fire a bullet).

So, I don't know who ordered that these rifles be rendered obviously inoperable via removing the bolt entirely. They were always inoperable, but someone went the extra step of saying "no, we need to make sure you couldn't have switched it out for a real one, that you could have loaded and used!".

In which case, why bother inviting the marines at all?

Or there could be a totally different reason why they were all removed. It would be pretty bad for the guy and I doubt it would ever happen because they take such good care of the weapons but what if one of the rifles was just missing a bolt, like it was lost. In this case they would have taken the others out so all the rifles matched. Its about as reasonable a reason as "it was removed so one of them couldnt shoot the president."

It really doesnt matter unless we find out the real reason it was done. All this article does is point to the rifles having no bolts and then makes stuff up.

[Svifnymr]

Or there could be a totally different reason why they were all removed. It would be pretty bad for the guy and I doubt it would ever happen because they take such good care of the weapons but what if one of the rifles was just missing a bolt, like it was lost. In this case they would have taken the others out so all the rifles matched. Its about as reasonable a reason as "it was removed so one of them couldnt shoot the president."

It really doesnt matter unless we find out the real reason it was done. All this article does is point to the rifles having no bolts and then makes stuff up.

If a marine lost his rifle bolt, I don't think they'd take them all out so they matched...

But yeah, we don't know if this was a "protect the president" thing, or some other reason, I'm just commenting that it is a step beyond the normal way in which they do things.