Eight Feet Deep

 Another day, another mass shoot­ing. This time in an Orlando, Fla., office complex.

 One has to expect mass shoot­ings and mass mur­ders will not end just because of instances such as the mas­sacre Thurs­day at Fort Hood. But one would could have hoped for a lit­tle respite in between.

 Army Maj. Nidal Malik, M.D., a psy­chi­a­trist, allegedly walked into a per­son­nel tran­si­tion­ing cen­ter yes­ter­day on the mas­sive Texas post and shot more than 40 peo­ple. The car­nage ended in 13 dead and 30 wounded. Malik was report­edly shot four times by a civil­ian Fort Hood policewoman.

Maj. Nidal Has­san M.D. in a coma and full of ques­tions that need answers.

 Tons of ques­tions remain a day later:

 Was Malik — who was born and raised in the U.S. — a main­stream Mus­lim turned jihadist or just another lone nut with a gun (or guns)? Media reports indi­cate some acquain­tances and rel­a­tives described Malik as a ded­i­cated sol­dier doing his duty. Other reports noted he was furi­ously try­ing to avoid his impend­ing assign­ment to a war zone and had spoke out against the ongo­ing wars.

 Was Malik a lone gun­man? Ini­tial accounts reported he cre­ated all the car­nage using two hand­guns. Arti­cles today say that he appar­ently did all the shoot­ing with one gun although he had another pis­tol in his pos­ses­sion that was not used. That sounds highly unlikely due to the sheer num­bers killed and wounded, not to men­tion hav­ing a lot of ammo clips to eject and replace.

 How was Malik able to get the guns to the scene of the shoot­ing? Were they his guns? Were they mil­i­tary weapons? It has been awhile since I last vis­ited Fort Hood but nor­mally sol­diers sta­tioned there, espe­cially offi­cers could drive on through. Vis­i­tors’ autos were man­u­ally searched inside, under the hood, in the trunk and with mir­rors under­neath the vehicle.

 A short note about the guns. The AP reported the weapon involved was a 5.7-mm semi-automatic pis­tol. I am not at all famil­iar with guns of the cal­iber, although my lack of knowl­edge isn’t par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant. A Wikipedia arti­cle I found talks about one such gun of the cal­iber. A reminder to take Wikipedia arti­cles with a grain of Wikipedium. Nonetheless, this par­tic­u­lar pis­tol in the arti­cle is a Belgium-made FN Five-Seven.  It is report­edly a weapons used by some SWAT teams. It sup­pos­edly has the capa­bil­ity for clips with 10 and 20 shells. Ammu­ni­tion devel­oped along­side the gun allegedly is capa­ble of pen­e­trat­ing Kevlar body armor.

 Why did the Army at Fort Hood ini­tially tell the media that Malik was killed and took more than an hour to cor­rect that piece of crit­i­cal information?

 Finally, what was Malik’s motive? Will he wake up from his coma and give answers?

 Another press con­fer­ence at Fort Hood took place a short while ago and I hoped more real infor­ma­tion on all or some of the ques­tions would be forth­com­ing. It turned out to be mostly cer­e­mo­nial with a moment of silence world­wide on U.S. mil­i­tary bases ordered by Defense Sec. Robert Gates. The news con­fer­ence fea­tured Army Sec. John McHugh and Army Chief of Staff George Casey. Sad to say, no earth shat­ter­ing infor­ma­tion came from that although I sup­pose it’s com­fort­ing for the top brass to come to the scene of some­thing that is the mag­ni­tude of this shoot­ing. The Commander-in-Chief, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama also is sched­uled to go to Fort Hood. Of course, America’s right-wing, para­noid, nut­dom class already is claim­ing ties between the sus­pected shooter and Obama. I wish these peo­ple would have a lit­tle class, a lit­tle com­mon sense and think about those who suf­fered from this ordeal. And, I wish these peo­ple would go out and promptly f**k themselves.

Other ques­tions will prob­a­bly require some time. How much? That’s one more question.

 The best news cov­er­age I have found of the mas­sacre comes from the nearby papers. The Killeen Daily Her­ald has an extreme amount of the per­sonal look at what hap­pened as does the Austin American-Statesman. Hav­ing worked that area for almost 10 years, I am very famil­iar with both news­pa­pers. The Her­ald has, shall I say, cer­tain insti­tu­tional lim­i­ta­tions. The States­man has been a good paper when its not too full of itself.

 Some offi­cial state­ments can be found at Fort Hood’s Web site. Once names of the vic­tims are released they can be found there and on the offi­cial Defense depart­ment Web site, plus on the news­pa­pers or other sites that choose to list them.