A Brief Observation Regarding the Fort Hood Shootings

Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a psychiatrist, but he went through basic training just like every other soldier, so he would have been taught to kill. Also, someone in his position would have been expected to encourage killing by counseling other soldiers in a way that would not have interfered with that aspect of their jobs.

So what puzzles me most about this tragedy is that people would be so shocked to see a member of the military doing exactly what he had been trained to do. Perhaps it's because this particular act of violence was committed against Americans here in the U.S. and not against foreign strangers in some backwards country in the Middle East.