Whose fault are the Ft Hood shootings?

Why, ours, of course.

David A. Love, editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and theGrio, but not a physician, ascribes the whole grisly mess to "secondary" PTSD inflicted upon Maj. Nidal Hasan in his psychiatric work.

Secondary trauma involves the emotional and psychological effects of working with traumatized people. Therapists, social workers and others who associate with victims of violence can develop symptoms of PTSD. As for an Army psychiatrist such as Hasan, listening to the horrific war stories of his clients on a daily basis must have taken its toll.

This piece is political correctness run amok. Earlier in the piece is this nugget:

All of America's young white male ex-marines did not bear responsibility for Timothy McVeigh and his bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, so why should the Muslim community shoulder a burden that does not bear their name?

Well, McVeigh was never a Marine, but never mind. He was convicted and executed for mass murders after he truck-bombed the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As a principal staff officer of US Army Criminal Investigation Command at the time, I played a part in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation task force. No one attributed McVeigh's crimes to PTSD, including McVeigh himself. Using McVeigh to shore up his argument is a strawman of no substance.

Just because we "should not jump to conclusions," as the president made sure to caution, does not mean that we can't draw conclusions at all. Mr. Love's article would have a lot more credibility if it at least tried to account for Hasan's long history of increasingly radicalized Islamism, that has by now been well-attested by witnesses both in Washington, D.C. and Texas. These accounts are so credible that the Army, FBI and DOD are doing the typical DC kabuki-two-step dance to make sure no finger gets pointed at them. That, my friends, is smoke (I worked in DC for five years) and for sure there is fire. But Love apparently doesn't even know about that topic. His eyes are shut to contrary facts.

To say at this point that Islamism had nothing to do with the acts Hasan is accused of makes no more sense than to say that John Wilkes Booth could not have been motivated by radicalized Confederate sympathies. Sorry, it just doesn't wash. There may well have been other factors impelling Hasan, but summarily and pre-emptively to push Islamism off the table marks Mr. Love as a decidedly unserious person.

Then come Dr. Scott Mendelson, M.D., practicing psychiatry at Roseburg VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon, who writes,

Everyday, I treat combat veterans, many of whom suffer Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. ...

It has been suggested that Dr. Hasan's behavior may have arisen from a "nervous breakdown" he suffered due to the stress of treating so many young soldiers returning from war. Phrases such as "secondary" or "vicarious" PTSD are being tossed around. ... Let me be very clear about this, it is no more possible to get PTSD from listening to soldiers tell their tales of their traumatic war experiences than it is to catch gonorrhea from hearing one talk about an unfortunate sexual experience.

And the rest of his article is basically a disassembly of Mr. Love's arguments, from a medical-psychiatric perspective. He concludes,

Stress from dealing with the emotional trauma of returning soldiers does not explain and certainly does not excuse his behavior.

And yet we really have no evidence that Maj. Hasan was suffering from "Stress from dealing with the emotional trauma of returning soldiers." Commentators (and no one else, be certain) have simply assumed constructed a self-fulfilling tautology:

1. Dr. Hasan counseled combat veterans

2. Combat veterans are psychologically scarred and many or most have some level of PTSD

3. Dr. Hasan felt their pain to the point where he cracked up.

Therefore: Dr. Hasan blew away 41 people, a perfectly understandable outcome of feeling the pain of so many scarred combat vets.

Oookkaaaaayyy.......

And yet there is nothing in the public record that evinces support for the notion that Hasan was affected by "secondary" PTSD, which Dr. Mendelson says doesn't exist in the first place. What there is, is ample evidence that Hasan became an increasingly-radicalized Islamist who openly denounced his nation's military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point of saying to his fellow doctors in a formal presentation that Americans who fight Muslims should have "boiling oil poured down their throats."

Conclusions are being jumped to, make no mistake. But the jumping is being done by the hand-wringing liberals and others (coff, Gen. George Casey, coff) who are shocked that someone shot 41 defenseless people, and who are devastated that the shooter turned out to be a Muslim. Whatever the facts, they tell us that the murderous spasm Hasan is charged with committing could not possibly have anything to do with his religion.

There's your conclusion, folks. Start jumping.