As a proponent of nonviolence from way back, I hate to be in the position of saying anything positive about military bodies, but as a matter of fact, if we consider the number of men and women who have gone through training by the U.S. armed forces and are now out in society, it is obvious that if said training turned them all into vicious killers, we would be in much more trouble even than we are now.
As one of the TV commentators I happened to see the other day pointed out (sorry, can't remember who it was), what military training does do is overcome the ordinary resistance most civilians have toward killing other human beings to the extent that, when the soldier is put into a combat situation and identifies certain people as "the enemy," he or she does not hesitate to kill them (especially when they are shooting at him or her). But fortunately, most (in fact, almost all) veterans, when they come back into civilian society, don't see the folks around them as "the enemy," so we civilians are safe, most of the time.
Actually, I kept thinking throughout this episode that it's hard to understand why this kind of thing doesn't happen much more often in the U.S., given that the country is positively awash in guns and there are obviously thousands of seriously psychopathic people running around.
I don't know anything about guns, and have never had any experience with them, but the experts I have heard commenting on this case seem to agree that it did not take an exceptional degree of expert marksmanship (markspersonship?) to do what they did. I get the impression that, given the technological marvels modern guns have become, lots of ordinary people who never had any military training could acquire one and with a few weeks' practice do just as well. And in fact, it seems that the skill that the older of these two individuals developed in the military was not really very remarkable -- it was pretty much what most graduates of basic training could do.
So I would conclude that we can't really pin the blame for this particular crime spree on the U.S. military, much as we lefties would like to. Nor, I think, can we pin it on the Nation of Islam (I agree with other posters that they are not a particularly violent group, despite their image), and certainly not on today's favorite villains, the "Islamic fundamentalists." We still know very little about these two guys, but (assuming that they were in fact the shooters) I think it will turn out that the causative factors were extreme psychopathology of some sort or other (I'm not a psychiatrist, either, so I can't say just what it was) plus the ease with which such powerful and deadly accurate firearms can be acquired in this country, thanks to the peculiar American love affair with "heaters."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche