A Sad End To The Day

I am in shock and saddened over the shooting deaths at Ft Hood Today. I am glad that the shooter was captured and will go through a judicial process. It might help us understand what happened and he will live to be accountable.

I saw one report that seemed to say that because Killeen was the site of another mass killing, they were somehow less shocked?
That makes no sense to me. The 24 people killed at the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen were normal civilians killed by a madman in Oct 1991.

I don't know who was killed and who was shot but I'll bet that most of them were either just born or very young children in Oct 1991. Many are unlikely to have ever heard of the shooting.

When our friend Jim Groenewegen committed suicide in November of that year, a Victim Services counselor was sent to the scene. Jim had shot himself rather than continue to die of the pancreatic cancer that had metathesized through out his body. We knew how ill he was and sadly accepted that he wanted control over his death. We were in much better shape than the counselor who still needed to work through the trama of providing services to so many people who were either shot and lived or had suddenly lost a love one to the Luby's mass killing.

My Dad was a psycologist in the Army during WWII. He used to tell me that his job while in the Army was to weed out the soldiers who were more likely to kill their own than kill the enemy. After the war, his job was helping to repair the damage that fighting and killing the enemy had done to normal soldiers who stayed to fight and watched their friends die, too.

What ever was going on with the shooter at Ft Hood, I think killing the people within the army he belonged to was a different kind of statement and craziness than going to Lubys and killing a bunch of strangers. Killing people who were part of the group he belonged to was like a final tearing himself apart. Too bad he didn't tear himself instead of killing and wounding so many people.

Its all sadness and pain.