Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Let's assume that war is crazy. Let's assume that a military psychiatrist is burdened with an impossible task of convincing American Service men and women that war is in their best interest as a people.

I have plenty of sympathy for people who join and realize some time later that they can't do it anymore. That's different than joining with the calculation that fighting can somehow be avoided.

I agree, don't gamble on not having to go to war if you aren't ready to do it. I'm just saying there are people who do this and hope that they won't ever have to. My uncle had his medical school paid for by serving in the air force in the 80s and paid it back by working at a rural US base as an OB/GYN for four years. There's no way in hell he could have become a doctor otherwise and he lucked out.

This guy had been in the military for over 20 years, tho, & had only recently acquired an islamofascist worldview. Yes, in theory he probably should have promptly retired from his position when he made up his mind to adopt such beliefs, but dude was obviously not playing with a full deck at that point.

Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

my point with virginia tech is that if someone from the school you went to goes and has a massacre you are going to be thinking about massacres more than people who didn't go to that school. any virginia tech alum is going to have taken that situation a lot more personally than people who have never been there, so at the very least it was in his headdd. somewhereeee.

sorta like how suicide is more common in places where there's lots of suicide in the news.

I can see how people join the military but don't actually want to fight. The military's use of incentives as a recruiting tactic have basically turned it into a social welfare organ. Still, anyone who joins ought to realize that they could be called on to kill and die.

xxpost

This guy was career physician though, so it's not like he was being called up to "fight." It just happened that there was a perfect storm that he had actually been called upon to serve the very cause that his recently-adopted beliefs so thoroughly negated. Add to that the factor of mental illness/instability & it was just the tipping point in his house of cards. You can only go so far to rationalize a situation that is, itself, completely irrational.

full o typos - sry.

the real clincher here is that we have someone who will have to answer for such a godawful thing

yeah, i really hope he stays alive. the mass murder-suicide always feels like a cheat. you want to sit the (pardon the language but, you know) motherfucker down in a courtroom and make him listen to the victims and the survivors. it may or may not have any effect on him, but who cares about him. it's good for everyone else.

Yeah, I just hope he comes to the point of, if not actual atonement, at least taking some sort of personal responsibility. If he comes out all "praise be to Allah!" fuck - I think we can all agree that the last thing we need to come of this is a whole new cycle of sociopolitical xenophobia. I mean, that is inevitable at this point anyway, probably, but the less amplified it is the better, obv.

This should all probably be moved to Steve's thread, anyway.

when we get our pink uzis, i'll make sure to find you and kill your first, fuckin homophobic shitbag.

jesus christ.

you realize how tasteless that is on a spree shooting thread? like way more tasteless than "god fuck this gay earth" which is tasteless but certainly nowhere near warranting a death threat?

safety tip: don't join the homicidal international gangster US military, one of the most evil forces on earth. Sorry, but truth.

does Fort Hood have a cute little logo that people can put on their facebook profiles to show how sensitive and caring they are? Preferably with a ribbon on it.

or is that just for college victims.

Morbs: let's see if you're still singin' that tune when a United Planets cruiser has to rescue your beautiful daughter from the destrucltive power of your own artificially augmented id.

crut, table had every right to be upset w/me: it was tasteless (in general), and esp on a thread like this. sorry, tables

you realize how tasteless that is on a spree shooting thread? like way more tasteless than "god fuck this gay earth" which is tasteless but certainly nowhere near warranting a death threat?

― the passos of unbanned sock (Curt1s Stephens), Friday, November 6, 2009 2:28 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Tbh I agree with Curtis. I didn't say anything last night but I'm glad that he did. I really don't think anything warrants a fucking death threat even if it wasn't serious and certainly not on a thread about a shooting spree. To be totally honest, I'm surprised tables wasn't temp banned for that. I thought it was pretty horrifying.

I didn't see it until this morning. However, I would likely have tempbanned both of them because:

a) death threats on a spree-shooting thread are incredibly stupid;
b) quoting seemingly homophobic subboard memes to a mainstream audience on a touchy thread where emotions are running high is also stupid

The basic moral of the story is "think about who you're talking to before you post". Let's move on.

dan is otm---it was pretty thoughtless of me, sorry!

can we tempban people for uncritically using the phrase "islamofascist worldview"

ha i wanted to point that out too :(

I just used that phrase to indicate that the guy had been indoctrinated to, or at least sympathetic with, some degree of radical Islam. I'm sorry if that is not the proper terminology, but I was using it to state what, in this case, has already been revealed as fact & not making some reactionary assumption.

Tempban away tho, if you like.

I just looked it up & yeah, bad phrasing. Sorry about that. I was typing pretty fast when I was posting on this thread last night. Normally, I would cross-check a term I had any doubts about, but it is what it is.

Has it been revealed as fact? All I've seen is the 7-11 vid of him wearing trad garb, and an AP bit where some witnesses said he was shouting @ll@hu @kb@r as he started shooting.

His superior officer, in a clip I watched last night, stated in an interview that he had become sympathetic w/ suicide bombers & other anti-American insurgents. If there have been any new developments which negate this, all the better. I really hope it is something else actually.

His superior officer, in a clip I watched last night, stated in an interview that he had become sympathetic w/ suicide bombers & other anti-American insurgents

And the response was...?

Given the scope of these murders and potential media vulturing, I created a dedicated thread here:

Fort Hood Shootings Nov 05, 2009 (suspect Major Malik Nadal Hasan)

First I've heard of his superior officer saying that, and it doesn't strike me as something an officer would say publicly -- and yeah, I'm skeptical that, if he had become sympathetic in that way, something wouldn't have been done. Those message board posts, though, if they are indeed his, seem to suggest a sympathy with suicide bombers. (But the people I've heard interviewed in his hometown, mainly in the Times -- the imam from his mosque, I believe, and his cousin -- don't seem to have thought that his view of Islam was particularly radical at all.)

Btw, the negative "Officer Evaluation Report" I mention above may not have been an OER after all; apparently it was some kind of performance report when he was working at Walter Reed. Which I guess may have been more a hospital thing than a military thing; I'm not sure. (Actually, come to think of it, there are officers in certain military specialties whose superiors aren't military at all, but civilians. Whether they would file an OER the same way as a superior officer, I'm not sure.)

And the response was...? - I just re-watched the interview, the clip Steve S posted last night at the top of the other thread. There wasn't much of a response, as the commanding officer is essentially being given an open platform to describe his relationship with the suspect (tho the "suicide bomber" comment I was referring to is something that the guy admits was hearsay - I missed that the first time around). It comes to light that the guy likely had some degree of sympathy w/ Islamic extremists. Lest I be misunderstood, I find that greatly upsetting & I hope it gets downplayed, which it obviously won't.

First I've heard of his superior officer saying that, and it doesn't strike me as something an officer would say publicly

I know, very strange, but again, that guy's going to be under a LOT of pressure right now to explain what if anything was done/could be done (per xhuxk's comments). Is pretty weird, though.

But the people I've heard interviewed in his hometown, mainly in the Times -- the imam from his mosque, I believe, and his cousin -- don't seem to have thought that his view of Islam was particularly radical at all.)

"he was such a nice boy... kept to himself mostly..."

From the looks of things now, perhaps he was harboring such sympathies privately or, alternately, his commanding officer is trumping it up as a convenient explanation.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009/11/wesh--up-to-8-people-killed-at-orlando-office-building/1

better link: http://cbs4.com/national/orlando.office.shootings.2.1296477.html

christ alive

outlier events seem to not be lying very far out atm

what in the hell

guys, we're not men or red-blooded americans if we don't have our guns.

i think one mass shooting a week should really be enough.

I had a feeling the miserable zeitgeist would produce a copycat or two.

My military cousin was stationed at Fort Hood until just six weeks ago and worked in the very building the shootings took place yesterday. Today, I live about 1 hour away from this downtown Orlando shooting and know exactly where it's all taking place. Too close for comfort, really.

A strangely casual detail in this Orlando report:

Steve Olson, spokesman for the Florida Department of Transportation, said one of the DOTs employees, a male, was in the building on official business and was shot.

He is alive and undergoing treatment. Olson would not elaborate on the injury or release the guy's name.

"Yeah, the one dude."

Anyway this shooter's been pretty quickly identified as a former employee of a business in the building, so there's your disgruntled stereotype for the day.

Okay, the guy only worked at this place for a year, and was fired in July 2007. Can't figure out why he'd retaliate after so much time.

The only good thing about these two shooting sprees is that they captured the shitbags alive. I can't help but feel that these spree shooters are just about as reprehensible as people get, and I'm glad as hell these two are going to have to face the consequences of what they've done. Anything to upend the notion of a romantic quick exit for anyone considering this in the future.

xp it takes time for true desperation to build

Is the Corner going to call him a terrorist?

i don't see facing the consequences as a great deterrent for future disgruntled shooters tbh