By now, just about every kind of pundit has weighed in on this terrible act perpetrated by a wicked man. Thirteen soldiers are dead now because of the apparent delusions of a single shooter who managed to get the best of many people before being incapacitated himself.
In the wake of this, I have several observations about it that I don’t believe anyone has really considered all that much:
- Was there more than one shooter? I heard the early reports saying that there was more than one shooter. Now this could have been misinformation due the immediate confusion of the incident, but that aspect of the reporting doesn’t seem to have been clearly addressed.
- Political correctness seems to have been blamed by many conservative pundits who believe Hasan was ignored because of it. Indeed, the responses from Obama, the military leaders, and many Muslims themselves seems to only fuel to their fire. The mainstream press isn’t helping either by totally ignoring Hasan’s apparent Islamic radicalism. But was that the real cause or could it be that this guy just fell through the cracks. Unlike God and contrary to what some people believe, government is not god nor is it omnipotent. They cannot keep track of everything we do no matter how many bureaucrats they employ and how many listening devices they plant. I’ve worked in a document management company where litigation papers were processed into a coherent database for law firms to index and search. There was loads of information passed through that company, most of which was ignored. Usually, we would find the occasional pornographic picture within some client’s data, mostly because they would store it in a password encrypted Excel file, which was easy to crack. But most of the time, we hardly ever found stuff to our interest and usually just let their data be sifted through. The point is, with all the information collecting that the government can do, they have to filter it down and even the best filters do not get 100% of the data they need to do their jobs. Could this possibly be a case of several bits of information passed along different hands (the FBI is made up of many people after all) and nobody really could put the puzzle together because they didn’t know it was a puzzle to begin with? This leads me to my next part…
- With all the information coming out now about Hasan’s apparent ties to a radical Imam and his attempts to contact Bin Laden or one of subordinates, where is it coming from and why is it coming out so fast? Usually it takes longer for this kind of information to come out. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t have this much dirt on them released within a week after their attacks. I don’t know about you, but this all seems way too convenient for my taste. Why would the government leak so much information like this about Hasan if the higher ups wanted to save face with the American people? It seems too self-defeating from where I stand.
- I guess the USA PATRIOT Act is nothing more than a farce. It did nothing to prevent this man from killing and hurting over 50 people. This was suppose to protect us from these kind of attacks and yet it wasn’t utilized. American security in the Federal government is much more ineffective than many people realized, although this should come as no surprise to you if you are a libertarian or libertarian-minded. We know that the larger the institution, the more inefficient and ineffective it becomes. And with dozens of law enforcement agencies, each with their own axe to grind, it seems that none of them can actually do a decent job of protecting us.
- Why did it take a local police officer to gun this guy down? I heard she was shot four times in the process. The military personnel at Fort Hood should all be ashamed of themselves. It was a freaking military base for Pete’s sake!! Every one of those soldier’s should have been armed or there should have been guards with firearms posted in key areas around the base. Hasan should have been riddled with bullets from a soldier’s automatic rifle, not some police officer’s sidearm. I’ve seen better security at a train station or the United States Botanical Gardens.
Ultimately, it has become apparent to me that the government can do nothing to protect us from the next big terrorist attack. I wish I could blame the politicians, but they pretty much maintain the bureaucratic machine at this point. This whole incident has really stressed the need to go out and obtain a firearm of my own and get a carry and conceal permit for it.
Because, at the end of the day, the only person I can rely on for my protection is myself. So let’s all stop with this nonsense about the government protecting us by fighting in dirty hills overseas, by building a pointless fence, and by reading our private e-mails and start looking at what we can do to protect ourselves.
Who knows, maybe there will be somebody who puts a bullet in an Islamic terrorist’s head before he can finish the phrase “Allah Akbar”. Unfortunately, that person will probably be sent to jail for murder and discharging a firearm in a public place.