Trump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon says

The return of the firing squad feels like one of those historical anachronisms that suddenly becomes very present. The military hasn't executed one of its own in over 60 years, and now the most high-profile mass shooter on US soil is set to become a test case for a method that most Americans associate with Civil War reenactments. There is a strange symmetry here: Hasan was an army psychiatrist, a healer turned shooter; his punishment is delivered by a squad of soldiers, a collective act designed to spread the psychological weight of the trigger. It's almost as if the state wants to make the killing impersonal by making it deliberately personal. Beyond the symbolism, there's the legal and political weirdness. The death sentence was handed down in 2013, but the military has been slow-walking appeals for over a decade. Now a president—who has never been shy about using the military as a prop—is personally approving the method. That raises questions about civil-military relations, the erosion of norms, and whether this is about justice or about sending a message. The article's framing—"Trump approves firing-squad execution"—turns a bureaucratic decision into a spectacle, and the spectacle is the point. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/05/trump-fort-hood-shooter-execution There's also a deeper weirdness in the method itself. Firing squads are making a quiet comeback in some civilian states, but in the military they're a relic. Unlike lethal injection, which tries to dress up death as a clinical medical procedure, a firing squad is brutally honest: human beings, rifles, a target, a volley. It doesn't pretend to be medicine. It's a ritual of collective responsibility, and that honesty is precisely why it feels so jarring in the 21st century. We've grown used to our executions being sanitized, even as we argue about them. This is the state reaching back into its own dusty past to make a point. And what is the point? Perhaps that the machinery of death never really goes away—it just waits for the right political moment. The first military execution in 60 years isn't happening because of a sudden moral consensus; it's happening because a president approved it, and the Pentagon followed. That's the real lesson: even the oldest, strangest rituals can be revived with a single signature. It's a reminder that history doesn't move in a straight line—it loops, stutters, and sometimes fires a volley into the present.