I don’t have anything to say right now. Awful is awful, and we’ll have time to dissect which particular flavor of awful this is soon enough. For now, keep the dead and wounded in your thoughts.
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Awful is indeed awful. Having taught at a school where there was a school shooting, my heart goes out to the victims and their friends and families. But I can’t help thinking – the NRA usually pipes up after something like this, claiming that “if only the victims had been armed this could all have been prevented”. How are they going to make that plausible when it happened to military personnel on an Army base?
Folks on base at Fort Hood don’t carry weapons unless they’re doing training exercises, at least not when my mom’s husband was deployed there with the National Guard a few years back.
If that’s what you can’t help but thinking when you hear about something like this, perhaps you need to take a long look at your thinking.
Elusis is right, BTW – people don’t walk around with weapons at hand on a military base (MP’s excepted).
Jeff, appreciate the thought. Nice video and appropriate to the situation, I think.
I roughly agree with this, at least right now. My only caveat is that it also goes for the folks who want to bring up the shooter’s faith. Now isn’t really the time for political point-scoring.
—Myca
Some of the comments on this post: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/11/fort-hood.html
are pretty damn chilling: a few think the soldier was justified in murdering the 12 others.
Quite right, Myca. Time enough to wait on that, to set speculation aside and wait for facts. Now is the time to mourn the dead and comfort the afflicted.
This being a feminist blog and all and with the comment above concerning the NRA, I think it’s worth it to note that the murderer was finally stopped by a civilian police officer, not a member of the military. A female police officer. Who did so after having been shot herself.
In this case I think we don’t need a gender-specific adjective. “Hero” will do just fine.
My father was working there that day. He was not injured (or shot at, as far as I know) but it’s strange to me why anyone would want to “shoot up” a place? My thoughts go out to the families.
Lenin’s Tomb defines itself as an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist British blog, with an affinity for British Marxism, although I can’t yet discern which party. Richard “Lenin” Seymour happily takes advantage of American freedom of speech for his book tours, but that response is just typical. Moreover, his blog is a very owner-monitored space. There are people out there who genuinely hate American and Israeli grunts and want them dead, and critical speech in reply, or even Britain’s relatively restrictive libel and incitement law, isn’t going to hold them up one bit. So why the hurt? That’s the modern British Left at work.
Er, you’d be surprised, Eurosaba, there’s a few leftists on that comment thread calling the likes of fairleft, mausod(those who see the shooting as a form of resitance) out.