Hasan was an army officer on an army base. Getting his hands on a weapon was not a problem.
If they really wanted to scare people, shouldn't they have called it a Minority Baby Killer Gun?
That's not entirely accurate, at all. He had no more access to a weapon, than a civilian school teacher working on the base. I think civilians believe that Army & Marine Corps bases are places where weapons are just laying about. They aren't. Weapons are highly secured, at all times. If you don't have a reason to remove your weapon from the armory, you're not going to be removing a weapon from the armory.
And, there's more than a probable chance that Hasan wasn't even assigned a sidearm, unlike all other line or infantry officers that are assigned a personal sidearm. It's probably for these reasons that Hasan used his personally acquired and owned weapons.
He got the gun over the counter just as you and I could.
They haven’t released whether he was using Armor Piercing Ammo illegally maintained.
In any event the Bullet is key to defeating body armor not the caliber. However, this particular 5.77 round travels at almost double the speed of normal handgun rounds and can defeat more kinds of body armor than a 9mm or .40cal.
Since he wasn’t up against body armor, and knew that, he wouldn’t need AP. Since AP is verrry hard to get and would risk arrest he probably used normal 5.77 ammo.
My personal thought was he wanted to be effective out to 50+ yards and this is the round for that. Or maybe that was just the kind of weapon he had. It is ideal for firing a lot of shots quickly because it has very little recoil. Just Pop Pop Pop like any other .22.
They need to stop whining about the guns. We are damn lucky the pig didn’t have resources to get his hands on a bomb. (which I suspect will be the next form of internal attack on the military)