Get the gun out of Donald Trump’s hands

Soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas are scheduled to lift their rifles and shoot one of their fellow citizens, who will have to be lifted out of his wheelchair to make the execution work. 

The sheer giddiness that the Trump administration has exhibited in announcing Nidal Hasan’s Dec. 3 execution should give us all pause. In reckless pontification after pontification, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has acted like a child who just received their first BB gun. Of course, his boss has long lusted to wield the power of death.

Nidal Hasan killed 13 people on November 5, 2009. He wounded 32 more. Each of them was simply going about their day. One of the dead was pregnant. One was a civilian who tried to stop the horror. Hasan calls himself a jihadist. I call him a monster. Perhaps we all should.

I understand why people want him dead. But there is a difference between desire and what is to our benefit.

In the last three years, I have witnessed fourteen executions as a spiritual advisor to men on death rows throughout the nation. I have watched the state kill with needles. I have watched it kill with gas. Every time, the killing shows up in disguise. Protocol. Procedure. Humane. The people in the room talk like they are just hanging out at the water cooler. They are all trying to keep their souls intact amidst the horror of their actions.

The firing squad comes naked.

The sound of gunfire and the image of someone’s chest exploding while they are strapped to a chair should not be lost on any of us. Because this is what we are asking our fellow citizens to participate in. There is no clean way to shoot someone. There is only the gun and the splatter of blood.

We keep hearing from all of these people who have no real experience with carrying out an execution. The Army has not executed anyone since 1961, 65 years ago.

Hegseth called the firing squad a no-brainer, which tells you how much brain went into the decision. He chose 1 p.m. because, he said, that was when Hasan began shooting. A Pentagon spokesman announced that judgment day had come, as if God had handed them the celestial gavel. They even floated a livestream. Pull up a chair, America. Grab a beer. Prepare for your children to be traumatized for life.

CNN reported that Donald Trump had no idea that Hasan was paralyzed from the waist down. He has used a wheelchair ever since being shot during the massacre he perpetrated. The president ordered a man shot before he knew the man could not stand up.

Like it or not, Hasan was born in Virginia and is a citizen.

Of course, Trump is the man who took out a full-page ad demanding the execution of five teenagers who were later exonerated in the Central Park case. He never apologized. Not once. This is the man who posted that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, wrote that Trump asked whether the troops could just shoot protesters in the legs. The last thing Trump needs is the power to shoot American citizens.

A rifle does not read the charge sheet. It does not check citizenship. It does not know the difference between a mass murderer and a man holding a sign. It only knows the order to shoot.

Hasan is the easiest man in the country to shoot. He has seemed to crave this death since the afternoon he started shooting. A firing squad is a printing press for martyrs. You cannot shoot a story. The bullets pass through the body and the story keeps running. 

For 17 years, the government has called Hasan a fanatic. Now it wants to give the rest of the fanatics the one thing they do not yet have: Hasan dead at the hands of the so-called evil empire, at the hour of his crime, on the ground where he committed it. You could not design a better recruiting poster for terrorism. Trump is making our world more dangerous by helping Hasan write his own ending.

Let Hasan live. Let him grow old in a cell. Let him answer for what he did every morning he wakes up. No appointed hour. No rifles raised in his name. No final scene for his admirers to replay. Let him be forgotten. That is a punishment a martyr cannot survive.

The families of Fort Hood have carried their dead for seventeen years. I know how the room empties afterward. The officials leave. The witnesses go home. The government moves on. The families of the victims are left with the weight of another body.

Stand down, America. Get the gun out of Donald Trump’s hands. We will all be better for it. Plus, we won’t have to worry about who might be next.