Shoot Him Live

The arguments against televising the long-awaited and eminently justified execution of Muslim fanatic traitor Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 and wounded at least 30, many of them fellow soldiers, add up to “That’s not who we are” and “Oh well, I never.” “It’s barbaric,” we’re told. It’s awful that people will have the opportunity to see justice delivered after so many years of legal onanism. What does it say about us as a people if we shoot a guy who murdered 13 of his comrades?

It says we are done playing games. It says we are serious.

When the U.S. Army executes that traitor, everyone’s going to know that we are no longer going to tolerate this kind of thing. We’re going to act. Decisively. If you betray your country and murder your comrades, you’re going to die. People need to see that. It makes a statement. That statement is not going to resonate with everybody. It doesn’t have to. There are a lot of arguments that this will just make this guy a martyr, but he’s going to be a martyr whether we show him getting shot or not. And for the Third World pagans who have taken up arms against civilization, they don’t seem to have a recruiting problem anyway. There’s always this idea that if we dare fight back against Muslim terrorists, we’re just going to make more Muslim terrorists. We might make some more, but we should kill them too.

After all, that’s the answer. Defeating our enemies. Whether you shoot them on the battlefield or tie them to a stake on a rifle range at Fort Hood, the answer to jihadism is lead.

Nor should we be ashamed of what we’re doing. This is justice. He deserves to die. He deserves to die much more miserably than he will. There’s no reason to hide this process simply because it’s aesthetically displeasing. That aesthetic displeasure will enhance its deterrent effect on other criminals, and it also reminds our society that we will inflict justice on evildoers. Americans can’t be sure of that right now. We have judges letting people get away with their crimes and politicians making excuses for the thugs. The chaos in our inner cities is a choice – it could end in a day. There’s an easy button – President Bukele of El Salvador pushed it and has saved tens of thousands of lives. Shooting this criminal and letting everybody see sends a message that at least the federal government is not going to tolerate evil.

The last public execution in America was in 1936, and do you think we’re significantly better off because we started doing it in secret? Why do you even have a death penalty if nobody knows it’s happening – unless the killer intrigues the media, it’s just one paragraph on page 20 in the newspaper. That defeats the educational purpose of executing criminals.

But to educate with it, you can’t sanitize it. We’ve tried to turn a process that is, at its core, the application of brutal force into something inoffensive, something that won’t draw a visceral reaction. Just put them to sleep with needles. Hide the electrocution behind walls. No gas chamber – it has all that choking and gagging. Don’t upset people. But it’s not wrong to make people upset. Part of what makes crime bad is what it makes us do. No one wants to have to execute anybody. But sometimes you have to do hard and ugly things, and hard and ugly things are best done out in the open, so there are no lies, no dissembling.

If you commit a crime, we’re going to kill you, and it’s going to be ugly. So don’t commit crimes. 

In the past, most executions were in public. The people got to see justice delivered. Some of the crowd's behavior would be ugly. That’s not going to be a problem here. It’s going to be on a military base with military discipline. It’s going to disappoint the critics, many of whom include the same people who were secretly or not so secretly gleeful over the caught-on-video bloody slaughter of Charlie Kirk for the crime of speaking freely, which, of course, isn’t a crime at all. Murder is a crime, as much as many of the critics don’t care about it. They can summon up all sorts of outrage over criminals being executed, but they don’t know the names of any of the dead.

I do. One of them was a former fellow California Army Guardsman who was serving on active duty at Fort Hood. I didn’t know him well – he was down in San Diego while I was in Los Angeles – but I had met him and he was a good guy. That piece of crap who had wormed his way into the rank of major took a gun and shot Captain John Gaffaney to death because Captain Gaffaney was serving the United States of America in a conflict against the traitor’s seventh-century, goat-loving savage friends. So yeah, I say shoot the b*****d and let everybody see.

And it’s important to do that out in the open. The death penalty is serious. When the government seeks to take a life through the judicial process, that’s a hugely important thing. And I participated in it, being assigned as a young lawyer to a pro bono defense case of a condemned prisoner. I got to see it up close, and I saw the utter moral bankruptcy of the death penalty defense bar. But I’m not ashamed of what I did. If the government proposes to kill you, you should get the best defense possible, and I was doing my duty to provide it.

And if asked, I would come back on active duty to do my duty and shoot that b*****d. 

But the point is that when we, as a society, go through a process that ends in taking the life of someone, there should be transparency. We should see it happen. We did not see what happened with Christa Pike – all those complex and convoluted procedures and safeguards designed to sanitize the act and separate it from its inherent violence served only to botch it. That’s not going to happen here. If those rifle rounds smashing into the traitor’s chest don’t kill him, the pistol shot to his temple that follows will.

And there’s something more to the decision to televise the execution. It shows that we, conservative Americans, are throwing open the Overton Window, in this case by throwing Nidal Hasan out of it. We can do things that the establishment assumed were off-limits, were inconceivable, could never happen. If a year ago someone had asked most of us if we would have this traitor shot, most of us would’ve answered in the affirmative, but we never thought it could happen. Well, we’re going to try and make it happen. And then the administration goes further – we’ll televise it! Suddenly, merely capping him at Fort Hood looks like the compromise position when that position was inconceivable a month ago. In the end, by pushing past the envelope, we’re going to do the things that we’ve always needed to have done, but that others either didn’t have the stomach for or didn’t want done because they seek America’s continued decline.

There’s going to be a lot of invective hurled our way. Who cares? Frankly, one of the best arguments for shooting the creep on the tube is the people arguing we shouldn’t – a motley crew of pinkos, aspiring Ned Flanderses, and nag-scolds. They all come at it from their own perspective, and all of them are wrong. The Left is going to be mad because we’re punishing a criminal; many think public killings should be restricted to publicly killing conservatives for being conservative. And then there are the soft conservatives who get an almost erotic pleasure out of telling other conservatives that they’ve failed to live up to the prisses’ exacting set of moral standards. They’ll tell you they support the death penalty but, you know, just not like this. That’s the story of their lives. They want conservative things to happen, they say, but they’re never happy about the conservative stuff that actually is happening. I’m looking forward to Army veteran David French’s forthcoming column “The Conservative Case for Being Mad at Actual Conservatives Who Want to Publicly Shoot a B*****d Who Shot a Bunch of My Fellow Soldiers.”

Now, is the traitor going to end up being shot and having it be televised? I think it’s pretty clear he’s going to end up being shot. He’s already gone through one round of appeals and the last-ditch ones aren’t going to work. But will it be televised? I think there’s a pretty good chance some goofy judge somewhere is going to decide that he has authority over how the military executes its miscreants and make some sort of order, probably citing the Eighth Amendment, that it can’t be televised. I don’t see the legal argument. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and it is hard to see how the visual transmission of the execution would constitute part of the punishment, since it would have no effect on the condemned, except maybe to make him sadder. Or perhaps even happier – who knows with these jihadi freaks. But of course, as we’ve seen, actual legal principles and rules don’t matter – what matters is how some Biden judge feels.

Of course, the last-minute flurry of orders will land at the U.S. Supreme Court, and this is precisely the kind of question that soft conservatives like John Roberts and perhaps some of the others will fold on. Hard to understand how you can be an originalist when the originals hanged their criminals in the town square, but hey, Obamacare was a tax, so whatever. 

The problem is that many in our society who should know better will fold when it comes to doing the hard things necessary to preserve civilization, and that gives the jihadists hope. When his fellow semihumans see him shot, they may think he’s a martyr, but they’ll also think we’re serious. They will see that we once again have the strength to take our own side, to fight, and to put an Islamist traitor into the ground.

Just one month until Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is unleashed, and it is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!

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