I'm listening to the radio this afternoon after finishing poolside yoga, when I hear them announce that one of the three shooters who were killed at the Ft Hood massacre (12 dead so far, 31 wounded) this afternoon was US Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. All three of the shooters are US Army soldiers. Ugh!
NPR dug up records of a US Army psychiatrist named Major Malik Nadal Hasan - the base 'shrink' - but have not confirmed if he is the same man as the shooter.
If all three of these shooters were Muslims, this will only further inflame the xenophobia among the rabid right and ignorant masses. Not good. 6Nov09 Update: only 1 shooter, Nidal, not 3.
9 years ago
You can bet it will. And even if there hadn't been any muslimaics involved, there are people in this country who will blame Obama. After all, his middle name is Hussein.
ReplyDeleteHe was apparently called a camel jockey and other racial epithets by other "soldiers"...
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/4Gpn26
Anyone wanna make an argument for having *more* guns in society now? We're just lucky this kind of crap doesn't happen more often in schools...much less in the military.
I Do Not care what he Was called. My father was constantly called a DP and a Polack growing up, and yet he never went back to shoot anyone. I bet during his lifetime, he was called Sand n*gger and camel jockey and tons of other things - none are a reason to go nuts with 2 hand guns.
ReplyDeleteThis Nidal guy was a nutjob. He was going to deploy to Iraq, was scared to death about it, and DID NOT tell his family? He premeditated this. You don't NOT tell your family that you're going, unless you never plan on going, choosing "Plan B" option instead.
Absolutely sucks that he didn't just blow his own head off, instead of taking more than a dozen lives. It's not the guns that kill people, it's assholes and bigots and racists and idiots and mentally ill and desperate people that kill people.
Conversely JoeM, I think that if MORE bystanders had weapons on them, this Nidal nutjob would have been stopped sooner, taking out one or 2 people, or maybe... being pre-empted completely, too scared to start shooting into a crowd of processing soldiers, and taken his own pathetic life instead.
To add to my argument for Nidal being a nut job, he had been proselytizing to Walter Reid recovering soldiers to convert them to Islam, reported yesterday on NPR.
This is not about guns in my mind, this is about a mentally ill scared little man, who happens to be Muslim, pre-meditating a slaughter of innocent people, for whatever f-upped ideology he may have embraced.
COMPLETELY pre-meditated
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07suspect.html
...gave his neighbor all of his belongings Thursday morning.
W T F motivates such evil?
Your father also didn't have the obvious mental issues that Mr. Hasan had. But if he had, then would things have been different? Maybe.
ReplyDeleteNo attempts to excuse this at all, Joe. But our culture of idiocy certainly played a part. I was called a lot of things growing up as well. And there were times where I could almost understand why people snap under the hatred and do things like this. Our society has a way of brutalizing people for being different. We're lucky this doesn't happen more often.
On the guns part, I disagree. This is, in part, about easy access to certain guns...like the FN-57, which uses the particularly deadly 5.7x28mm round and can accept 20 and 30 round magazines. Give this guy a friggin' revolver and he would not have killed so many people so quickly. Oh, and Texas has no waiting period...
And what amazes me is that he managed to do so much damage in a place where there are armed people. So much for the NRA touting the benefits of a heat-packing public.
Another angle:
ReplyDelete10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood.
This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time...but once again, the jingoists and xenophobes among us will use this to rally for exclusion, profiling, and war.