As usual,
Going Postal author Mark Ames is the authority on post-shooting-massacre reportage (see below), although many facts are still sketchy. Predictably,
right-wingers are latching onto the facts that the shooter, Major Nasan, was Muslim and didn't want to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, as if these two facts should have been obvious tipoffs to the military to throw Hasan in the brig, intern him at G'itmo, or Lord knows what.
UPDATE (Nov. 10, 2009): There are a lot of reports coming out now about Hasan's connections to Islamists and sympathy for terrorists, but the facts are still sketchy. We also don't know the extent to which the CIA was already aware of Hasan's rhetoric and connections.But I think other facts of this massacre are more interesting. Apparently, using two handguns, Hasan managed to shoot over 40 soldiers on a military base before two
civilian police officers took him down (one a "
tough woman" cop no less!). I find that amazing. It's an argument for gun control staring us in the face. Indeed, who should be better trained and equipped to react to a shooting massacre than our nation's soldiers? (On the flip side, who is better trained to kill efficiently?) And yet, it seems, these soldiers were caught by surprise and unable to stop Hasan from killing 13 people and wounding another 38 in a span of 5 minutes. In fact, this mass shooting seems identical to most other school and workplace shootings: people screaming, confused, taking cover anywhere they can, and then the police arriving on the scene either to kill the shooter or find his suicided corpse.
UPDATE (Nov. 13, 2009): It now seems, a la Jessica Lynch, that early reports of a heroic woman cop were overblown. One witness reports all she did was get shot and fall down, and it was a black policeman who "neutralized and secured" Hasan. The black policeman said as much.Yeah, I'm gonna catch flak for even implying that our soliders are not flawless supermen, but relax. I think the whole thing is entirely explainable: they were on their base, the place where they probably felt safest on Earth; and many of them probably recognized Hasan, or were perhaps even treated by him. What's atypical in this case is that the victims found nothing inherently alarming or scary about seeing someone with a gun -- which was actually to their detriment. Contrast this with a student in his familiar desk at school, or an office clerk in his cubicle: the last place either would expect anything dangerous or out-of-the-ordinary to happen. In the few seconds it takes for the brain to process what is happening -- "hey, isn't that so-and-so, the guy who... hey, is that a gun? no, couldn't be, he's so quiet and I heard that ... oh no! he's pointing it at me and he looks strange, run!..." -- the victim has already been shot, perhaps fatally. The two situations -- military base vs. school or office -- aren't that different after all. Familiarity breeds complacency.
Remember, this all happened in 5 minutes with a few non-military-issue handguns, not M-16s or anything you wouldn't find in anyplace in the USA. Indeed, Hasan's expertise with semi-automatic weapons -- which must have required re-loading, think about that -- meant he could score a higher body count -- another argument for everybody's being an expert with firearms.
I suppose the "More Guns Make Us Safer" crowd will advocate our military's carrying handguns with them at all times while on base, in order to end future shooting rampages more quickly. However, I expect our non-political, no-nonsense U.S. Military will have none of it. Or perhaps they'll caution us all to be vigilant at all times to shooting massacres, but it's just not humanly possible to be always on high alert, even for the world's best professional soldiers.
As usual, reasonable, rational people see one uniting factor in all these massacres, and hence come to one inescapable conclusion: easy access to an abundance of firearms is the problem. So what are we going to do about it? As usual, nothing. Apparently, we hate ourselves, each other, and our country so much that we wish literal "Death to America!"
Fort Hood Massacre: A Brief History of American ViolenceBy Mark Ames
November 6, 2009 | The Exiled
URL:
http://exiledonline.com/fort-hood-massacre-a-brief-history-of-american-violence/
