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Newspapers and other sources are filled with words about why security measures at Ft. Hood in Texas could do nothing to stop the latest mass shooting. This occurs mainly as a reflex action after every mass shooting event and, in this case, because it happened at a “fort”.
Calling Ft. Hood a fort is a bit of a misnomer. It is actually more like a small city, a place where 100,000 people come and go on the average day. It size is 340 square miles, more than TEN TIMES the size of Manhattan. Ft. Hood covers about 150,000 acres. You can’t provide adequate “security” to prevent all unauthorized weapons in a place, a city, of that size. It just can’t be done.
Another question is why shootings can occur in a place, a military base, where there are so many weapons. Couldn’t someone just pull out a gun and stop it? The answer is that it takes only a few seconds to shoot and kill a lot of people. Unless someone is standing right near the gunman, taking someone down fast enough to prevent injury and death is impossible. It is mainly a matter of how long it will take to stop them, not how fast it could be accomplished.
Just as with the shooting of a TSA agent at LAX, there are now calls for more security measures. It won’t, however, make any difference. Mass killing has become an epidemic in our society, a favored way for the mentally troubled to take other people with them when they decide to die.
It is not going to help, and could do a lot of harm, for armed people to be stationed at the security check points at airports. Any determined terrorists could penetrate those check points any day of the week. They are there mainly for show and to stop people who are not terrorists from doing foolish things, like taking a weapon onboard when they have no intention of using it. The massive security presence at airports was put in place because, 1. the federal government didn’t know what else to do immediately and, 2. to reassure the traveling public, especially the occasional flier, that everything possible was being done. (It also diverted attention away from the failure of the CIA and others to prevent the attacks of 9-11, 2001.)
Likewise, trying to secure every point in our society, including Ft. Hood, isn’t going to work, either. There are steps that can be taken and some of them might prevent some killings, but, in the main, once someone has a gun and has determined they are willing to die with it in their hands, all the security measures in the world are not going to prevent the loss of life.
The problem is elsewhere. People come home from wars wounded in mind and spirit. If one looks at the historical record, societies that wage war pay a price, often a big one. Not infrequently, wars have led to revolutions in the countries that have gone to war, even in the “victorious” nations. America was plagued by riots and lynching of black citizens during and after WWI. Following WWII, the Civil Rights movement erupted in America, which was followed by the women’s movement and the gay rights movement, among many other upheavals. These kinds of events have happened after wars around the world. Portugal underwent a revolution following the loss of its colonies in Africa in the 1970s, a revolution that spread to Spain a few years later. The peace movement in the U.S. in the 1960s, ‘70s and beyond can be tied directly to America’s use of the atomic bomb to end WWII.
One answer is to not to go to war if we aren’t willing to pay the price. Another is better care and treatment of veterans, something at which we have generally failed, even when we have tried to do better. This is not meant in a harsh way, but the fact is that the killings at Ft. Hood this week could be seen, in part, as one aspect of “collateral damage” from America’s latest wars. The people who were shot, of course, did not in any way deserve to be victims and everything reasonable must be done to prevent such events in the future, but stopping them entirely by turning the world into a “security zone” is not the solution. It won’t work. There aren’t enough security measures short of an absolute police state.
Doug Terry
4.4.14
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