Fort Hood

It’s hard to know what to think, except what a tragedy it is. We still know very few details, but everyone’s already got an opinion. I tend to agree with James Fallows when it comes to events like this:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

RIP.

Jason Zengerle makes what I think is the appropriate counterpoint:

[I]t’s difficult not to see the Fort Hood shootings as different from Austin and Columbine and Paducah. The fact that they occurred on an Army base; the fact that the shooter was Muslim officer; the fact that we’re currently fighting wars in two Muslim countries–they all add up to make the meaning of this more apparent than the others. Rather than Columbine, think of Oklahoma City as a more appropriate historical precedent.

If you’re interested in what they’re saying around the web, Andrew has, as usual, a good roundup. Chilling stuff.