Submitted for your perusal and edification, E-mail Blog report received from:
Massad Ayoob On Guns from “Backwoods Home Magazine”
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FORT HOOD: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Posted: 08 Nov 2009 08:05 AM PST
Friday’s tragic atrocity at Fort Hood brings to mind many questions. A friend who’s an appellate attorney in New Mexico has commented privately that almost any public place in his state would have seen a different outcome, with the perpetrator shot down by a random armed citizen as soon as he shouted “Allah Akbar!” and raised his FN pistol. Dave Workman, my colleague at the Second Amendment Foundation, notes [urlhttp://www.examiner.com/x-4525-Seattle-Gun-Rig ... rrectness=]HERE[/url] that had the trained warriors present had weapons with which to fight back, the casualty toll would have been minimized. He compares it to the incident years ago in the Luby’s Cafeteria in nearby Killeen, where a mass murder of the people legally required to be unarmed led directly to Texas passing a shall-issue concealed carry law to arm the helpless. As Dave notes so well, there’s a lesson there.
Fred Zera sends along THIS LINK to remind us that the Fort Hood massacre is not the first time GI blood has been fatally shed stateside by a cowardly assassin acting in the name of radical Islamic beliefs. Major Hassan apparently showed his hostility and even his murderous inclination well in advance. Someone should have reported it, and someone it was reported to should have acted upon it. I don’t intend for this blog space to become a host for anti-religion sentiments of any kind, but the fact is, our nation is in global conflict with people who commit mass murder for the sake of their belief system, and it cannot be ignored in the interest of either religious freedom or political correctness.
I’m still wondering why, for all those hours, the authorities told us the killer was dead, and only later revealed that he was alive and on a ventilator? Was someone perhaps pumping the SOB with sodium pentathol “truth serum” to find out whether his actions constituted a conspiracy or not? If so, the ACLU will have a problem with it, but the pragmatists among us will not.
When someone asked a Fort Hood spokesman why there was no soldier with a gun among the crowd to stop the religious fanatic, the spokesman almost indignantly replied that they didn’t need to be armed, because at the base they were “at home.” Someone might have told him that so many of us “backwoods home” folks DO keep guns at home for protection, because self-protection is already there and “official protection” takes time to arrive. At Ft. Hood it took some three minutes. A long-declared jihad has made American soldiers stalking victims. They have a right to be able to protect themselves any time, anywhere, just like the unarmed citizens they serve to protect.
Finally, kudos to Sgt Mark Todd and the wounded Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who courageously “rode to the sound of the guns,” shot down the mass-murderer, and ended the carnage.