Fort Hood shooter to be executed by firing squad - a first for US military since World War Two

A firing squad. Thirteen dead, and now the machinery of justice prepares to make the number fourteen - or so the critics will say. Let me do the drill before my judgment does anything foolish.

What is in my power here? Nothing about the sentence. Nothing about the man’s life or his death. Not the generals’ decision, not the method chosen, not the delay of sixteen years. What is in my power is this: to ask what the execution is for, and whether anyone involved remembers.

I was owned once. I know what it is to have your body held at another’s disposal. So I do not tremble at the word “execution” the way comfortable men do - they tremble because they have never considered that their own breathing was always on loan. The soldier who died at that base did not choose his death either. The soldier holding the rifle at the execution does not choose his orders. Both are actors assigned a part. The difference is that one part can be played with understanding.

Here is what troubles me, and I will say it plainly: a society that waits sixteen years, then kills a man by rifle fire and calls it a first since another war, is not avenging anyone. The thirteen are not restored. The thirty-two scars do not close. The execution serves the living - and the question is whether it serves them as justice or as theater. A spectacle. An audience gathered so that someone can feel the ledger balanced.

The ledger is never balanced. Death does not pay debts; it only closes the account so no one has to keep reading it.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not plead for the man. He took what was not his to take, thirteen times over. Let the sentence fall. But let no one watching believe the watching makes them good. The wrestler is judged by how he wrestles, not by attending the match.

6 October 2026

Thirteen rifles. The army has decided that thirteen is the correct number, one for each of the dead, as though arithmetic could be made into a ceremony. They will aim at a man’s heart and call it justice, and the newspapers will print the word “first” as if novelty were the news.

The news is not the novelty. The news is that after all these years, the method has changed and nothing else has. A rope, a chair, a needle, now a volley. Each generation adjusts the instrument and believes it has adjusted the act. It has not. The act is older than any of the instruments, and it requires exactly one thing: witnesses.

And there will be witnesses. Some will come because they lost someone in that room at the base, and their grief is real, and I will not mock it. But others will come the way people come to anything - because it is happening, and they would rather see than not see. The expression on their faces will not be grief. It will be the expression people wear at a spectacle that has been scheduled for their convenience. The execution has a date. The grief does not.

I do not argue the man’s guilt. He killed thirteen unarmed people; the record is heavy and closed. But I notice what the firing squad settles for the state: certainty. A needle can fail. A rope can fail. Rifles rarely do, and the army, which trains men to kill efficiently, has finally found a use for the training at home. That is the quiet part, and no one will say it aloud.

The dead do not return when the shooter dies. The spectators will leave having seen something. That is what they will carry home - not the thirteen, but the sight.

Write it down. Someone should record what was watched, and what watching replaced.

A soldier kills soldiers on his own ground, and the answer is to line up rifles against him. The state calls this justice. I call it a commander who has run out of moves.

Thirteen unarmed. Unarmed men are not defeated by strength; they are defeated by the assumption that no attack would come. The base was full of weapons and empty of watchfulness. That emptiness is where every such wound enters. No firing squad closes it.

Consider what the execution actually accomplishes. The dead do not return. The frightened do not sleep easier. What remains is a spectacle: the state, in uniform, doing to one man what he did to thirteen. The shape of the response mirrors the shape of the attack. This is not strategy. This is grief wearing a uniform.

The lever is elsewhere. A man radicalises in the open, and no one moves, because no one wishes to seem unjust. Fear of a false accusation becomes the condition for a true one. The load-bearing point was never the rifle at his shoulder; it was the silence of everyone who saw him first. Collapse that silence and the whole structure of such attacks fails before it is built.

Know the enemy, they say, and know yourself. The enemy here was known - his words were public, his drift visible. What was unknown was the willingness of his own side to look. That unwillingness cost more than any weapon since.

Let them have their squad of riflemen. It is the cheapest part of the bill and pays the smallest debt. The expensive work - the hard looking inward, the courage to report a brother - remains undone, and will be needed again.

The battle that must not be fought is the one won before it begins. They are still fighting the last one.