The Fort Hood Shooter Was Just Another Gun-Toting Hothead

Investigators now believe that the most recent shooting at Fort Hood was not due to mental illness, but rather an argument over the denial of leave requested by the shooter, Ivan Lopez.

That makes this shooting no different than the run-of-the-mill gun violence on the streets and in our homes. One person feels aggrieved and seeks to even the score with a gun. Some will still argue that PTSD or mental illness had a role, but since such shootings are so common among people who have no record of either condition, no such case can be made.

The real problem is that people like Lopez believe that violence is their first recourse whenever they feel angry or threatened. In other words, this guy was just a hothead with easy access to guns.

The NRA will probably try to spin Lopez as a man who was pushed to the brink by an unreasonable military bureaucracy that wouldn't give him enough time to attend to his mother's death. But it is the attitude that shooting people is a perfectly reasonable thing to do that's the cause of these deaths. The attitude espoused by the NRA.

In other words, Lopez was simply cut from the cloth as George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn.