It actually didn’t say he committed suicide. The article said he had no magazines for the weapon. It could have been that he was carrying the weapon to or from class and something totally unrelated happened.
Correct. I went to USAFA and at the time we all had M-1’s in our rooms for dress/parade and in my case, marching tours. They were inoperable and plugged to prevent firing. The only active weapons authorized to cadets were for pistol/rifle class and those were checked in/checked out and tightly controlled. Will be interesting to see the full story here.