Read Lee Hancock: I felt jittery and ridiculous lifting my hands toward the hulking silhouette. I told myself to squeeze. I stared at the paper target 20 feet away.
I jerked my index finger and jumped at an explosive flash and bang that sounded like a high-powered rifle. Yet my hands absorbed only a bump, and the barrel of the FN Five-seven barely bounced before leveling on the target. Soon, 20 holes riddled the paper man’s chest. I felt a frisson of adrenalin-jacked amazement as I ejected the empty magazine, slapped in another and leveled the gun at the paper man’s head. After months of covering the Fort Hood massacre, I felt a compulsion to shoot a semi-automatic pistol like the one used that awful day.
I had an emotional hangover from all I’d seen and heard since an identical gun cut down 44 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, killing 13. I realized picking up a Five-seven probably couldn’t assuage that, much less answer the unfathomable: why the horrific happened again. Yet by holding a pistol identical to U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan’s, I might learn more about how the worst bloodletting on any U.S. military installation went down.
Hasan’s last public utterance was his scream “Allahu Akbar” — the Muslim exhortation “God is great!” — before he mowed down colleagues he’d sworn to lead and heal as an officer and physician. He has maintained silence for months in a solitary Bell County Jail cell, awaiting a decision on whether Army prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
So I turned to his gun. With each visit to a gun store or range, I realized how easy it was for nearly anyone bent on violence to find the right gun and learn to use it with deadly efficiency. With each trigger pull, the unthinkable became more a thought problem, an equation solvable with chemistry and physics, zealotry and rage. With each staccato burst, I would discover viscerally how that lightweight weapon would transform even a military misfit into a mass murderer.
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