Soap Box / Fort Hood Shootings

Last Thursday the shooting of Americans on the Fort Hood Army base in Killeen, Texas shocked the country. In the 1990s our daughter, Melani spent several years active duty Army, serving two years in Stuttgart, Germany and the remainder at Fort Hood. At the base she met and married her husband, Rick, also active duty Army, and in 1998 our grandson, Jared was born in Killeen. I talked with Melani over the weekend at home in Vancouver, WA and she was as angry as many of our current and former military families are that warning signs on the shooter were overlooked. And saddened that here in America where soliders should have a sense of security they faced an armed murderer in a place where they were unarmed.
I find no small amount of irony that I still have to remove my shoes and walk through a metal detector to board a plane ... God forbid fingernail clippers or more than 3 ozs of deodorant make it through security. Yet Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American solider, a man with published sympathies to terrorists and questionable mental health walked onto the largest US military base in the country with two non-military issue handguns and massacred soldiers and civilians. Unbelievable.