On: Fort Hood shooter to be executed by firing squad - a first for US military...

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.