If any criminal in this country deserves to be executed, Nidal Hasan is a prime contender.
The man who strolled into the Fort Hood Readiness Processing Center and killed 14 people, including an unborn child, in the name of Islam and terror should be put to death, without question. Our Douglas Andrews had plenty to say on that topic, and I also certainly regret that justice has taken this long to be served.
With that in mind, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recently announced that Hasan will be executed by firing squad publicly, with a live stream of the event. Hegseth intends this as a deterrent for those who intend to commit similar crimes. Whether the live stream actually happens remains to be seen, as President Donald Trump has yet to make the final decision, but this is unprecedented in many ways.
For starters, the U.S. military hasn’t carried out an execution since 1961. You won’t find a time when the U.S. military executed someone via firing squad since 1945, over 80 years ago. Just like the guillotine in France, military executions had previously been a thing of the past.
It goes even further. There hasn’t been a legal execution of any truly public nature in this country since the summer of 1936, when rape and murder convict Rainey Bethea was hanged in front of thousands in Kentucky. This event became the last of its kind because the atmosphere of the event was more like a rowdy, hostile football game than it was an exhibition of a convict’s death. The press widely announced it as a “carnival of sadism.”
Given the considerable amount of time between the previous dates and today, this would obviously be the first American execution ever broadcast to the internet. Many people are concerned for a couple of important reasons.
The “internet community” is known for many things, chief among them being that it takes nothing seriously. Everything can become a meme or a joke. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Obviously, seeing the light in things can be very positive. But in other cases, it has led society to act in very poor ways. The internet’s morbidly humorous attitude toward 9/11 is an infamous example. A much more recent example was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed on camera in a video that millions of Americans saw. A little over a year later, people have joked about him and made endless memes. What do you think would happen if you showed a live-streamed execution to people with similarly sadistic senses of humor?
The other reason to be concerned with this broadcast is far more dangerous. It can be noted that the only other groups of people that have live-streamed executions are terrorist organizations. These terrorist groups have a couple of purposes: to spread fear into the hearts of their enemies, but also to inspire those who are interested in their cause to join them. Nidal Hasan was one of those people, and he was inspired to commit heinous atrocities because, in a twisted religious sense, that’s the example that the terrorists whom he looked up to set.
One could also look back to 1999, when two Colorado high schoolers opened fire in their high school and killed more than a dozen people. This story received weeks of national media coverage meant to deter people from doing it, but the publicity only inspired the sadists. Since then, more than 70 similar shootings have occurred.
Nidal Hasan is someone with a clear agenda, and the media has already unintentionally given this agenda far too much runway. The consequences of giving this agenda actual airtime by putting Hasan in front of a camera could be devastating, however well-deserved it may be. Media coverage of the worst evils has proven to be more likely to fan the flames of those evils than suppress them.
