"There is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this."

I'm truly starting to hate this story. Take away the Arabic name, and you've got someone who was a loner, quiet, kept to himself in general, gave many warnings that violence was on his mind, couldn't apparently form or continue relationships very successfully, and finally acted out against random members of a group against which he felt he had a grievance.

This is the story of the usual lone shooter.

No doubt his religion gave him some sense of justification, but that doesn't explain things very well when he's so similar to lone gunmen who are Christians or agnostic or Church of England.

And this infectious PTSD theory is really pretty silly. As John says, it has no data behind it, just the good old Vietnam crazy veteran myth.

But everyone wants to make it a testimony to their favorite overarching theory, from combat stress to the notion that Islam is bad and no Moslem can be trusted.

Which more or less guarantees that the one thing we won't be able to do is understand what really happened.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/11/working-combat-stress-without-combat.html#comments

The real issue of what happened in Ft. Hood is an overall issue for Americans period. While people (mostly) on the right want to use this as a Muslim bashing incident*, even if the Army gave Nadal a dishonorable discharge AND his money back, he would have taken his anger out at another Luby's, a KinderCare, or a mall. In other words, the unarmed (notice how he did not go to take out the MPs)

Everyone supposedly knows a person is going to blow - in hindsight. But we don't deal in Precrime in the US. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty which is usually after a crime has taken place. What everyone including the military are trying to do is

1. how to spot a potential violent person
2. how to stop them from doing a crime without treading upon their rights and due process of law
3. how to reduce violence in the future

*and an Obama bashing incident, which makes this even more heinous. I agree that he's not doing too well, but using the tragedy against him is no better than the Dems using Katrina or 9/11 against W. And I didn't vote for O

I deeply detest it when events such as this are used as vehicles for partisan messages that bear no real relationship to the underlying cause. In my darker moments, I wish I could hook partisans of both wings up to car batteries and shock them into the ability of making a distinction between which things to connect to partisan views and which to leave aside.

This guy was a disturbed kook. IOW, he had serious mental issues. I really wish folks could do a better job of viewing such incidents from as "disturbed-kook-centric" perspective. This guy has tons in common with other disturbed kooks: the inability to form healthy social connections etc, etc.

What is troubling to me is that this guy was a shrink, and that he had managed to remain in this profession despite serious warning signal over a lengthy period. It's sad to me whenever any bureaucratic system turns into such an unremitting @ss-covering festival that no person within it has the courage to weed out a bad cog. Or that the few who did try were ignored.