Is Major Hasan responsible for his actions? Are we?

The Major Hasan case once again raises a fundamental conflict between liberals and conservatives.

It's an article of faith for conservatives that we are and must be completely responsible for our actions. This total responsibility apparently kicks in at the moment of our 18th birthday.

But it's an article of faith for liberals that we're depraved on account of we're deprived (as Stephen Sondheim neatly summarized this debate in "Officer Krupke" from West Side Story).

Who's right?

Neither. But I'm right. The bottom line is: people do what they do for many reasons, including outside influences, moral reasoning, brain chemistry, etc. We can get into endless arguments about degrees of culpability in crimes because of this--but we don't need to--IF we reorient the criminal justice system around public safety instead of its current orientation around punishment.

Anyone with life experience should realize that some people are truly unable to control themselves--as is the case with those afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome. I've heard that at least 20% of prison inmates are mentally ill. I'm guessing it's even higher.

Or take someone whose brain chemistry is intact but whose single mother was, say, a meth addict, and this someone has never heard a kind word or felt a gentle touch in his 18 years of life. He isn't compassionate because our society has failed to give him any personal experience of it in his life.

But--and it's a huge but--even if you believe that no one is responsible for their bad behavior--that it's society's fault, or bad genes, or rotten parents--that doesn't mean we can tolerate letting dangerous people run around loose.

The question should always be: is this person or organization dangerous to the rest of us? If so, they must be made safe for the rest of us. That could mean prison, or a mental institution, or a halfway house, or supervised probation, or something else. But as long as someone's a danger we must act.

So, for example, a habitual drunk driver with scads of DUIs is a candidate for doing whatever is needed to keep them from driving--even if that means putting them in a low-security jail of some sort. The same goes for street people with no visible means of support and a string of very expensive (for us) trips to the ER for alcohol poisoning or ODs.

If anything, I'd advocate taking a lot of people off the street who are now running around loose--but letting loose a lot of people who are no danger to us.

Doesn't that make sense? Many police departments are called departments of public safety. I advocate taking that seriously. And sidestepping the useless wrangling lefties and righties constantly carry on.

As for Major Hasan--he's already been show to fit the profile of a mass shooter--a loser in his personal life, unable to form/hold relationships with women, physically unprepossessing (i.e. kind of chunky and short), showing signs of disordered thinking and religious obsessions that worried his peers greatly. Whoever assigned him to go to Iraq with this sort of background should be cashiered, by the way. I bet the person who did it was just trying to get Hasan out of his/her own jurisdiction.

But Hasan, regardless of whether he's insane or a terrorist, will never see freedom again--surely there's no disagreement on that front. And while I oppose the death penalty if there's the slightest doubt, there's isn't a smidgen in this case. He did it. And even if he's insane, he deserves to die, because it's immoral to force jailers to risk their lives around him.

Note that for an insane person he planned and executed his attack very effectively. To kill that many people--most of them trained soldiers--in such a short period of time took careful planning and execution that was both quick and methodical. And quite capable. That's not the kind of insane that I saw when I lived in Berkeley.

So from a public safety viewpoint I believe you can justify the death penalty in cases like this, even if you leave retribution/vengeance out of the equation.

Fort Hood mass murder

I keep thinking about something Osama Bin Ladin said a decade ago: that Christianity is a religion of life, while Islam is a religion of death, and that this fact made us weak and them strong.

So here's an American Major and a psychiatrist--and an Islamist. He was willing to die, to be sure. And to murder as many people as he could before going to his fate.

Nobody wants to deal with the possibility that Islam is more likely to produce Major Hassans than are other world views. This thought doesn't conflict with the likelihood that the average Muslim isn't murderous. I'm just asking whether Islam produces a statistically significantly higher percentage of terrorist/murderers than other world views.

And if so, what can we do about it? Every Islamic terrorist stands on the shoulders of Islamist thought leaders. We have to go after them, and do so in Islamic terms--that's the trick, I suspect. Instead of talking about how Islam is bad, we have to talk about how Islamists are bad Muslims.

We have to attack the underlying beliefs directly. Calling murderers like Hassan cowards or nut cases or solitary actors is both ridiculous and counterproductive. He wasn't a coward--given his beliefs, he was actually quite brave. Studies of terrorist murderers have indicated that they aren't insane in the sense that, say, a paranoid schizophrenic or a manic depressive is insane. And he didn't act alone. He was brought to this state of mind by legions of effective propagandists. I bet if you look at the websites he frequented and possibly the individuals he talked to at his local mosque, you'll find the ideological support for his murders.

Hassan was a Muslim terrorist, trying to achieve social change through murder. I'm sure that's how he saw himself (except for the "terrorist" label of course). Our challenge is to get other Muslims to view him as a bad Muslim.