Our Shooting Double Standard: How We Decide Which Madmen Are Terrorists?

Nidal Hasan, Ivan Lope.

Fort Hood was the site of two awful rampages in recent years. But the two shooters were described very differently.


By Sara Kamali
Last month, U.S. Army Spc. Ivan Lopez killed three people and wounded 16 in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. Four years earlier, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at the same sprawling Texas Army outpost.

Despite the strikingly parallel narratives of both men forever linked as Fort Hood shooters, who were both ruled out as terrorists by law enforcement, the media coverage of Lopez and Hasan has been markedly different. Specifically, Lopez, like many other non-Muslims who have used firearms to kill, has been classified as “mentally ill,” while only Hasan has had the label of “terrorism” attached to his story.

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Both men were transferred to Fort Hood only a few months before committing their atrocious acts: Lopez moved to Fort Hood in February of 2014, and Hasan transferred there in July of 2009. Both were increasingly disconnected from their fellow soldiers. Lopez felt some in his unit had not treated him appropriately and Hasan felt similarly alienated and discriminated against. Both also held deep grievances against the U.S. Army. Lopez was upset about a denied leave request and Hasan did not want to deploy to Iraq despite orders to do so on Nov. 28, 2009.

Both also sought mental health treatment: Lopez for post-traumatic stress disorder after serving four months in Iraq in 2011, and Hasan for his distress as an Army psychiatrist listening to others’ accounts of service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A sampling of national headlines immediately after the shooting shows the development of Lopez’s story arc as one of cause and effect. Because Lopez suffered from untreated depression and anxiety, the narrative goes, he snapped. The opening line from the CNN article, “Fort Hood Shooter Was Iraq Vet Being Treated for Mental HealthIssues,” is: “Spc. Ivan Lopez’s friendly smile apparently gave no hint of a history of depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.”...

Conversely, the headlines of “Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Malik Hasan” held no such concern for the state of his mental well-being, despite his similar search for counseling.

The cover of Time magazine on Nov. 23, 2009, had a portrait of Hasan with the word “terrorist?” in bold blacking his eyes, the windows to his soul. Within the cover story, “The Fort Hood Killer: Terrified … Or Terrorist?” the opening made clear his religious (read: Islamic) rationale:

What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods — his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran.

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