debaser

Iraqis are not allowed to carry weapons, period. If we caught them with a weapon in their car we would arrest them and turn them over to the police, who would immediately let them go.

Handguns were not allowed, but we usually turned a blind eye when we found one. First off, none of the violence being perpetrated in our AO involved pistols. Second, we figured that if we lived in Iraq we'd all want a pistol, too.


EDIT- Note: there are a lot of weapons either not addressed or prohibited under CPA and Iraqi law that are non-issues. For example, we had many hunters in our area, and equally many shotguns. We never confiscated these except when we found other damning evidence in the residence or vehicle. Often times we would actually give hunters shotgun ammo when we came across them, as we recieved a metric fuck-ton of #6 shotshells for our shotguns (which were totally useless to us).

__________________