Hate ads?! Subscribe for just $5 a month!

pew report black

Hate ads?! Subscribe for just $5 a month!

POTD: The Royal Bermuda Regiment With H&K L104A2

Listen to Article

The Royal Bermuda Regiment’s deployment to Kent for Exercise Active Shield 26 is a textbook example of how small, overseas territories keep their forces sharp by borrowing the best kit and doctrine from the mother country. The H&K L104A2—essentially a 40 mm less-lethal launcher—gives the Bermudians a graduated-force option that lets them project authority without immediately reaching for rifles, a capability that matters when the same troops might be called on to secure a cruise-ship pier or a hurricane-ravaged neighborhood back home. Watching the regiment train alongside Caymanian soldiers under the watchful eye of the Royal Lancers also underscores a quiet truth: the British Commonwealth still functions as a distributed training network that keeps even tiny militaries interoperable with NATO-standard gear.

For American Second Amendment advocates, the story is a useful reminder that the right to keep and bear arms is not an all-or-nothing proposition; it scales with mission. The L104A2 is a single-shot, shoulder-fired system whose civilian-legal analogues—short-barreled AR uppers chambered in .410 or 37/38 mm launchers—are already on the U.S. market precisely because the Constitution treats the tools of security as presumptively protected. If Bermudian part-timers can be trusted with such equipment thousands of miles from London, the notion that American citizens cannot be trusted with similar or even superior options inside their own borders starts to look more like policy prejudice than prudent risk management.

The deeper implication is strategic. When every friendly port in the Atlantic can field a platoon that understands escalation-of-force protocols and the weapons that support them, the overall deterrent value of the West rises without adding a single extra brigade to anybody’s payroll. That is the sort of force-multiplier the Founders would have recognized: an armed, trained citizenry—whether in Hamilton, George Town, or Galveston—ready to secure their own communities and reinforce one another when the storm arrives.

Share this story