Free Republic

When I first see the Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), it is hanging limply from the ceiling by a strap attached to its neck, dangling over a treadmill. I can’t wait to try it on.

I hate violence. So much that I can barely tolerate the evening news, where crime is given a spotlight. Yes, I know it exists, but why should I dwell on it? It only serves to depress me because I feel so helpless against it. Why would people ever commit such acts? It is mind boggling. The Fort Hood killings were heartbreaking, terrible, and should never have happened. Innocent soldiers were hurt, and the lives of their families will change forever. No one should die the way they did. When I first heard about them, I was upset, of course. I...

He was supposed to help her hero son - but all she saw in Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's eyes was evil. The mom of a soldier who received psychiatric treatment from the accused Fort Hood gunman said she was frightened of the psychiatrist from the very beginning of her son's stay at Walter Reed Medical Center. "I looked into his eyes, and he scared me," Cindy Gagnier told the Daily News. "He made some comments to me that made me feel very uncomfortable, and I don't become uncomfortable very easily." The New York-born mother of four was at her son...

The Army psychiatrist authorities say killed 13 people and wounded 29 others at the Fort Hood Army Base Thursday was a recent and frequent customer at a local strip club, employees of the club told FoxNews.com exclusively. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan came into the Starz strip club not far from the base at least three times in the past month, the club's general manager, Matthew Jones, told FoxNews.com. Army investigators building their case against Hasan plan to interview Jones soon. "The last time he was here, I remember checking his military ID at the door, and he paid his $15...

The President has asked the nation not to jump to conclusions about what happened at Fort Hood, which is usually good advice, but it is also what government officials generally say when the government fouls up. Good advice or not, I am jumping to an obvious conclusion: This should not have happened. That doctor should not have been at Fort Hood. I don't care how hard-up the Army is for mental health professionals - a government psychiatrist with bad performance ratings who had been trying to get out of the Army and who had been saying what Dr. Hasan had...

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is awake and talking, a Brooke Army Medical Center spokesman said Sunday. Dewey Mitchell, public affairs chief at the hospital, said he did not know if the accused gunman in Thursday mass shooting at Fort Hood is talking to investigators. “I am not sure how much he is talking,” Dewey Mitchell said. “There is some communication going on. I just got that indication from people on our nursing staff.” Hasan, wounded four times in a shootout with post police, is in critical but stable condition, Mitchell said.

President Obama says "we cannot fully know" what led Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill 13 people and wound 38 others at Fort Hood, Texas Thursday. Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before the killings, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces the enemy, and opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam. His rampage at Ft. Hood has the markings of an act of Islamic terrorism. But in his weekly address, Obama says, "We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing." And while the killings were "heartbreaking" and...

Lessons learned from the horrific Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 are credited with averting an even bigger massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, Thursday afternoon when police officer Kimberly Munley confronted the gunman without waiting for backup and took him down with four shots. Reviews in the aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech, where 32 died, found that first responders' decision to be careful and wait for backup probably cost lives as that gunman moved unchecked from classroom to classroom as law enforcement massed outside. Those findings had found their way to Fort Hood's Special Reaction Team, which had practiced...

In the aftermath of shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people and injured another 30, Dierks Bentley learned that he had a connection to the civilian police officer who stopped the rampage. The singer was featured in a photo with the officer, Kimberly Munley, that made its way to television news shows and the Internet. Bentley met Munley earlier this year during a Fourth of July music festival at the U.S. Army post near Killeen, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire Thursday (Nov. 5) at Fort Hood. Munley was at the scene and...

When Wrightsville Beach police detective Shaun Appler pulled over a suspected drunk driver in 2000, he couldn’t have foreseen the dangerous situation that was about to ensue. Thankfully Appler’s partner, Kimberly Munley, was there to save his life. While Appler was talking to the driver of the vehicle, a third man approached the detective and interjected himself into the discussion. Appler said he asked the third man to leave, when he didn’t, the detective tried to arrest him. A struggle ensued, and the two men eventually rolled down a hill. When they came to a stop, the man was straddling...

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday. As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base....

Fort Hood shooting suspect, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, wanted out of the Army after being constantly harassed by others in the military and was called a "camel jockey," his family said. As Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq, he was suffering from some of the same stresses that he was trained as an Army psychiatrist to treat. Although the 39-year-old had just been promoted to major in May, his family says he had hired a lawyer to help him get out of the Armed Forces. "Apparently became very disgruntled in the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan and voiced...

Witnesses to Thursday's massacre at Fort Hood said alleged shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was calm as he opened fire at a crowd of young soldiers, pausing only to reload before he was taken down by a female officer that many hailed today as a hero. "It was very deliberate in his approach, they said that he was calm," Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the base commander at Fort Hood, told "Good Morning America" today. "Several soldiers shot multiple times and were recounting how they were shot." The attacker killed 13 people, mostly military, and wounded 30. The Fort Hood...

He prayed every day at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., a devout Muslim who, despite asking to be discharged from the U.S. Army, according to his aunt, was on the eve of his first deployment to war. On Thursday, authorities said Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old Arlington, Va.-born psychiatrist, shot and killed at least 12 people at Fort Hood.*** Nidal Hasan spent much of his professional career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., caring for the victims of trauma, yet he spoke openly of his deep opposition to the wars in Iraq and...

Age: 39 Education: 1997 graduate of Virginia Tech University. Received doctorate in psychiatry from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Career: U.S. Army psychiatrist. As of Oct. 13, he had less than a year of clinical practice. From 2003 through this summer, was an intern, a resident and then a fellow at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. Also, he was listed by the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress as a fellow for disaster and preventive psychology. Commissioned as a captain, he was promoted to major in May. Personal information: He...

Fearing that a gunman who killed 11 people at a military facility in Texas may have been Muslim, US Islamic groups were bracing themselves for a public backlash against the faith today. Soon after Pentagon officials named one of the shooters at the Fort Hood facility as Nidal Malik Hasan, Islamic groups rallied to condemn an act President Obama had earlier described as a "horrific outburst of violence". "The guy's name is a Muslim name," Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) told AFP, expressing fears about damage to inter-faith relations, already strained by the September 11 attacks,...

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris will not seek the death penalty for an alleged gang member accused of murdering a father and two of his sons last year, a prosecutor said today. The announcement in San Francisco Superior Court means that Edwin Ramos will at most serve life in prison without parole if convicted of the June 22, 2008, slayings of Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, Matthew, 16. The decision is in keeping with Harris' campaign promise never to seek the death penalty. There had been speculation, however, that with Harris running for...

BRUNSWICK, Ga. - As cryptic as ever, Glynn County Police Chief Matt Doering wouldn't say this afternoon whether the man charged with tampering with evidence and obstructing police in their probe of Saturday's mobile home massacre is tied to the deaths.

Concealed Handgun Permit Holders Kill 7 Police, 44 Private Citizens Over Two-Year Period 31 Incidents Result in Criminal Charges or Suicide of Concealed Handgun Permit Holder Washington, DC--Concealed handgun permit holders killed at least seven police officers and 44 private citizens in 31 incidents during the period May 2007 through April 2009 according to a new study (http://www.vpc.org/studies/ccw2009.pdf) released today by the Violence Policy Center (VPC). The release of the study comes as the U.S. Senate is expected to take up today--Monday, July 20--an amendment to the defense authorization bill (S. 1390) that would create a de facto national concealed...

The first wave of slayings haunted Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. The killer slipped mostly unseen through the night, preying on older women who lived alone. He raped them and squeezed their necks until they passed out or died. On the 17 who were killed, he placed pillows or blankets over their faces. The second wave hit a decade later in Claremont -- five older women raped and strangled, faces again covered. Even with at least 20 survivors, police never connected the two homicide-and-rape rampages nor solved either of them. The victims gave conflicting descriptions of the rapist, police in...

Washington, DC (AHN) - An FBI program that investigates unsolved killings along highways has linked long-haul truck drivers with hundreds of murders across the country, the Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend. The Highway Serial Killings Initiative (HSKI) has solved more than two dozen killings since it started five years ago, authorities said, according got the Times. At the center of HSKI's operation is a database holding information on more than 500 female murder victims, whose bodies were discarded at or near truck stops, motels and other places along well-traveled truck routes nationwide. The database also has information on...

1 January 2008Genocide Watch has called a Genocide Alert because of genocidal massacres that are increasing daily in Kenya in the wake of a disputed election between President Mwai Kibaki, who is a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, and Mr. Raila Odinga, who is ethnically a Luo. Ethnic riots have broken out in Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret, and numerous other places in Kenya. People have been pulled from their cars and their identification cards checked for their names, which symbolize their ethnic identity, and then killed if they belong to groups being targeted.  Hundreds of people have already been murdered. ...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The scene repeats itself daily on city streets: a driver gets stuck bumper to bumper, blocking an intersection and preventing another car from turning left. But authorities say that was enough to cause Edwin Ramos to unload an AK-47 assault weapon on a man and his two sons, killing them. The deaths immediately drew public outrage, which intensified when authorities revealed that Ramos, 21, is an illegal immigrant who managed to avoid deportation despite previous brushes with the law.

Commentary by Daniel T. Zanoza, Executive Director So, it happens again, this time at Northern Illinois University. Five students are killed by a mad man, numerous others are wounded and then the killer takes his own life. For the next few weeks, we will be hearing loads of speculation as to why. Some will blame the DeKalb, Illinois killings on guns. Some will say the lack of guns at the University prevented school security from defending the innocent. And then some will go into the deeper, psychological explanations for why these young people kill. But many will miss the mark....

I know that many are, rightly, focused on the Primaries and elections. However, news is also happening around the world. Many of these events may not seem to affect those within the US. However, events in other nations show patterns. Patterns point to outcomes. Outcomes which will directly affect America. Today's post focuses on a series of stories from the UK The first article is from The Sydney Morning Herald concerning honor killings among Islamics. Sadly, this cancer of honor killings extends to the US and Canada, but that is for another post. The grainy video, taken on a mobile...

2 charged in Wash. holiday killingsBy DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP Associated Press Writer Posted on Fri, Dec. 28, 2007 AP Photo - King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, left, and Prosecutor Dan Satterberg leave after addressing members of the media to explain charges being filed against a couple accused of killing members of the woman's family, Friday, Dec. 28, 2007, in Seattle. Michele K. Anderson and Joseph Thomas McEnroe, both 29, were charged Friday with aggravated first-degree murder in the methodical Christmas Eve shooting deaths of her parents, her brother, his wife and their two young children. The two were ordered held...

MEXICO CITY - A wave of organized crime violence terrorizing many parts of Mexico is driving fear into the heart of the entertainment business with the murders of several popular musicians, suggesting no one is immune to the rampant brutality. Most disquieting were the weekend slayings of two singers who had crooned only about love and loss, not drugs and guns like some "narcocorrido" celebrities killed in the past. The murders of Sergio Gomez, lead performer for the top-selling group K-Paz de la Sierra, and Zayda Pena of the group Zayda and the Guilty Ones has mainstream singers worrying they...

Austrian Man Shoots Colleague, Slices off Penis in 'Honor Killing' VIENNA, Austria — Austrian authorities said Thursday they arrested an elderly Turkish-born man suspected of fatally shooting a younger Turkish associate and slicing off the victim's penis in what investigators called an "honor killing." ... Officials said witnesses claimed the man allegedly shot the victim, a 58-year-old Turkish-born man, in the street with a shotgun at point-blank range and then cut off his penis with a knife, leaving him to bleed to death. Two teams of surgeons worked at the scene to save the man but were unable to revive...

NEWARK, N.J. -- Three of the young people had been ordered to line up against a wall on the weedy steps behind an elementary school and were shot to death from close range. A fourth was found alive by police slumped near a set of bleachers about 30 feet away, with gunshot and knife wounds to her head. All were from Newark; and all would soon either start or resume their lives away from the violent city, at a college hundreds of miles away. Ofemi Hightower been accepted Thursday to Delaware State University after two years of rejection letters. Terrance...

Mexico takes gloves offPresident gambles with use of military in drug crackdown By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Article Last Updated: 07/09/2007 07:25:29 AM PDT MEXICO CITY — Every Monday morning, President Felipe Calderon settles in at the head of the table in the presidential library at Los Pinos, Mexico's fortresslike chief executive's compound. Calderon presides over strategy sessions with the leaders of Mexico's army and navy, key players in the centerpiece initiative of his seven-month-old presidency: a military assault against drug cartels. No Mexican president in recent history has convened his security council with such regularity, but few of his...

Forty-eight police officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year, the FBI said Monday. Forty-six were shot and killed and two were struck by vehicles. The 48 officers intentionally killed were among 114 who died in the line of duty. Both numbers were down slightly from last year. [Snip] Nearly half of the intentional killings, 22, occurred in the South. Eleven officers were killed in the West, seven in the Northeast, six in the Midwest and two in Puerto Rico Seven fewer officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year than in 2005. The...

THIS WEEK, California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and a group of Democratic legislators will reintroduce the California Compassionate Choices Act, which would allow terminally ill patients found to be of sound mind to request medication from doctors "to provide comfort with an assurance of peaceful dying if suffering becomes unbearable." Like the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity law it is based on, the California bill nowhere mentions suicide, except to say that "actions taken in accordance with this bill shall not constitute suicide or homicide." That clause was framed to address concerns about legal liability, but the avoidance of "suicide"...

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Vanishing students. Dead bodies. Fears something sinister is lurking in the shadows. A string of college student drownings across the Midwest has all the makings of great mystery. Or does it? Rumors have persisted for years that a serial killer is prowling Interstate 94, hunting young men in college bars and plunging them underwater. Investigators, though, say there's no evidence of foul play. They say the victims were so drunk they fell in the river and died. Not so fast, says criminologist Douglas Gilbertson. An assistant criminology professor at St. Cloud State University, Gilbertson has spent...

FORT PIERCE, Florida (CNN) -- Four "persons of interest" were being held in the Palm Beach County Jail on Friday in connection with the shooting deaths of a family of four this month along Florida's Turnpike, authorities said. The people in custody, who were not identified, were being held on federal drug charges, authorities said. "We are looking for more people," a law enforcement source said. A late-morning news conference was scheduled to discuss the case. Late Thursday, the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office issued a nationwide bulletin asking people to be on the lookout for a 1999 red Dodge...

Police are investigating a Saturday shooting in Mesa to find out if it's connected with the Serial Shooter, who has targeted parts of the Valley since May 2005. Related Links Today's Top Stories News "We are not 100 percent sure if it is linked, but we want to err on the side of caution and let the community know it's a possibility," said Mesa Sgt. Chuck Trapani. Like the 34 shootings in the West Valley, Phoenix and Scottsdale that police believe were committed by a serial killer, Mesa's recent shooting occurred in the early morning to a victim who was...

Sunnis wage online war over killings By Jim Muir, in Baghdad (Filed: 08/07/2006) A heated internet debate has developed among militant Sunnis over the tactic of murdering large numbers of Shia civilians. The outcome of the website exchanges could be crucial in deciding whether Iraq can pull back from the brink of civil war. The discussions were prompted by a bomb attack last Saturday that killed at least 66 people in the Baghdad slum district of Sadr City. A statement claiming responsibility gave a sense of the bitterness felt by many Sunnis, now an angry minority in a country they...

BEIJI, Iraq - Investigators believe a group of U.S. soldiers suspected of raping an Iraqi woman, then killing her and three members of her family plotted the attack for nearly a week, a U.S. military official said Saturday. Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops. The Americans entered the Sunni Arab’s family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army general investigating whether military personnel tried to cover up any part of the alleged massacre of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians in Haditha late last year has completed his report. Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell has sent his report to Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, and U.S. military officials there were expected to announce that Friday, according to a senior defense official. No information about his findings was provided. The official, who requested anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made, said there is no timetable for how...

Hundreds Palestinian security forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas went on a violent rampage against the Hamas-led government Monday night, riddling the parliament and Cabinet buildings with bullets to protest an attack against their comrades in the Gaza Strip by Hamas gunmen. The security men shot out the windows of the parliament before storming the two-building Cabinet complex, where they smashed furniture, destroyed computers and scattered documents. No casualties were reported. But the mob set fire to one of the Cabinet buildings, causing heavy damage as flames quickly spread. "Every time they touch one of ours in Gaza, we will...

NEW YORK - On a March morning in 1968, American troops swept into a village on South Vietnam's central coast in search of communist guerrillas. Instead, they found unarmed civilians — and gunned them down, leaving bodies huddled in ditches. Nearly four decades later, the notorious name of that hamlet — My Lai — has been summoned from memory again, as the U.S. military investigates allegations of mass civilian killings by a group of Marines in the western Iraqi town of Haditha. While the numbers differ — upward of 300 at My Lai, compared to 24 at Haditha — some...

June 1, 2006 — Military sources told ABC News that there are likely to be charges filed against officers up the chain of command in connection with the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005. Those who could be charged include senior officers who were not on the scene at the time of the killing but should have known something wrong had happened and done something about it. Today the White House confirmed that it was nearly three months after the Haditha killings that an investigation began, only after Time Magazine showed a video...

CORINTH, Maine - The Maine Department of Public Safety has no plans to change the state's Web-based sex offender registry despite the killings of two sex offenders whose addresses were apparently obtained online. A Canadian man used the registry to obtain personal information about the victims, authorities said, renewing fears that such lists expose ex-convicts to vigilante violence. "The events of the weekend will obviously be reviewed, but there are no plans to change the Web site at this point," Stephen McCausland, Maine Public Safety spokesman, said Monday. The gunman, Stephen A. Marshall, a 20-year-old from Nova Scotia's Cape Breton,...

Hiding and terrified, some of those inside a Capitol Hill house where six people were shot dead during a post-rave party Saturday managed to call 911 for help, whispering to avoid discovery by the heavily armed gunman, authorities said Monday. Kyle Aaron Huff, 28, taunted his victims at the home at 2112 E. Republican St., saying as he fired, "There's plenty for everyone." Four men were killed in the rampage, but the most shocking revelations came Monday, when authorities disclosed that the other two victims were young girls: a 14-year-old from Milton and a 15-year-old from Bellevue. The King County...

Ankara - Honour killings and blood feuds have claimed 1 190 lives in Turkey in the past six years, despite tougher penalties for such crimes, say police on Friday. Police said that the figures showed that most of the victims and suspected perpetrators were from the country's mainly Kurdish east and southeast, where the practice of killing to clear one's honour was still widespread among the largely feudal population. Of the victims, 710 were male and 480 female, but the proportion of men who were suspects in murders was far higher at 1 413 men to just 180 women. The...

Judith Apter Klinghoffer at the History News Network reports that Nigerian Christians are being macheted by Muslims "outraged at the Danish cartoon nonsense. Gateway Pundit is reporting that 35 persons have been killed, 30 churches burned, and 5 hotels set ablaze. Rantings of a Sandmonkey is reporting injuries, but no deaths yet, in Egypt. In an update, Klinghoffer reports that Nigerian Christians are retaliating: Finally, MSM has the story it has been waiting for, a story about Christians and Muslims killing each other. As I have noted bellow, the Christians have concluded that they can either continue to die or retaliate....

Gang killings put LA on course as murder capital By Catherine Elsworth in Compton (Filed: 26/01/2006) Killings in Compton, the hub of gangland activity in Los Angeles, have risen to the highest levels in 10 years. Homicides increased by 72 per cent last year, putting the district on course to become the murder capital of the US. Nearly 70 people were killed in Compton city itself while at least 10 more were murdered near the area's boundaries. The once-affluent city is known for brutality and guns and during a guns-for-gifts amnesty over Christmas, 610 firearms were handed in, including AK-47s...

The man accused of killing American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang told a jury Friday that he acted in self-defense after mistaking her Bible for a gun. Rayfran das Neves Sales is accused of killing Stang, 73, with six shots from a .38-caliber revolver on Feb. 12 on a muddy road deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest. Sales testified he and Stang had an argument over who owned the land he was working, and that Stang threatened to "finish him off" with the help of some 150 people living on a sustainable development reserve she...

BANGKOK, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Militants raided a village in Thailand's restive Muslim-majority south overnight, shooting dead up to nine people and wounding eight others, the army said on Wednesday. Residents of Baan Gra Thong, a Muslim village in the southern province of Narathiwat, were blaming the killings on security forces and were barring police and army officials from entry, southern Army spokesman Acra Tiprote said. But he said the army was not responsible. "This is the work of troublemakers who created the incident and blamed it on security officials," the spokesman said. "We have learned that eight or nine...

Baghdad's mortuary reels under the weight of killings By Oliver Poole in Baghdad (Filed: 07/11/2005) The bodies are arriving at the mortuary in Baghdad in such large numbers that the orderlies have run out of places to store them properly. They are forced to leave them in piles in the overloaded freezer compartments or send them for burial in anonymous graves. Grief at the funeral of a driver, killed on Saturday by gunmen Last month there were 972 corpses received, almost all victims of violent death. The vast majority were brought in with bullet holes. Many had their hands bound...

They say if you want a donkey to do something, get his attention first. So, whack him on the head with a 2-by-4. That'll do it. But what about people? How many times do humans have to be hit on the head before they pay attention? Oh, I don't know. Let me count the ways: The U.S. Embassy takeover in Iran; the Hezbollah kidnapping of 20 U.S. and other hostages in Lebanon; destruction of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; destruction of the U.S. military barracks at Beirut airport; truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait; truck bombing of U.S....