At around 8:15am a 34 year old former naval reserve member named Aaron Alexis entered the Washington DC Navy Yard and killed twelve people with an automatic assault rifle. He did so by walking directly into the building using his own pass, obtained through his work as a contractor for a Fort Lauderdale based company called The Experts.
He wasn’t stopped by a metal detector, or, for that matter, any security guards. That’s because funding was recently cut in an effort to save costs.
Mister Alexis had been discharged from the Navy in 2011 after several reports of misconduct, and had had several run-ins with the law since 2004 when he, according to the Seattle police, shot out a construction worker’s tires in a “blind rage.” Mister Alexis’s father cited his son’s work during the rescue and clean-up efforts in the days following 9/11 as a source of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
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Mister Alexis and his massacre, it seems, are a product of the last dozen years combined – a man indicative, perhaps, of the jilted generation that has sprung forth, a generation used to being misled, and a generation that turns to bitterness instead of trust. Mister Alexis’s motives aren’t known at this point – but if what his father said is true about the post-9/11 PTSD, Aaron Alexis may be drawing from the same well of disenchantment as the rest of us.
The fact that the gate was – for all intents and purposes – wide open for a man with an assault rifle to be able to walk right onto the Navy Yard complex is also indicative of just how bad the partisanship has gotten in politics. We’ve reached a point where we are trading human lives to save some money: a bizarrely Faustian agreement if there ever was one.
Yet with each new detail, the plot thickens: an unnamed federal source revealed to CNN that “Navy installations command attempted to reduce access control costs,” and “as a result, at least 52 convicted felons received routine unauthorized installation access, placing military personnel at increased security risk.”
Yet why this is an issue now is hard to fathom: why would the military – who receive $682billion a year – appear to cut costs on literally their own front door? It seems backwards, and possibly another bald faced lie. The US military can read the headlines on a newspaper from space if they wanted to: they can certainly allocate enough funds to protect a Navy Yard.
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That this happened so close to the Capitol Building shows the jarring disconnect between the decisions made on the hill and the reality of those decisions, and how they affect human lives. Twelve people – thirteen if you count Aaron Alexis – died because of poor decision making and narrow-minded budget concerns that put, and is still putting, American lives in danger. The fact that a gunman can walk onto a military base with an assault rifle and end a dozen lives is sickening no matter which side of the political divide you happen to fall onto.
