The real question is whether it's necessary. What does the public gain from seeing it? Hasan's crime was beyond heinous. He broke his allegiance to the United States, gunned down fellow soldiers, and carried out a clear act of terrorism that, given what he claimed to be fighting for, can reasonably even be viewed as an act of war.
Too many people have lost the plot on what it means to be American. The right to disagree with the country—loudly, publicly, even harshly—is one of the things that separates us from the regimes we oppose. That right, though, is not unlimited. It ends where allegiance ends.
Hasan didn't disagree. He switched sides and opened fire on his fellow countrymen sworn to protect the constitution and our fundamental freedoms. The question is whether putting his execution on display makes that line clearer to anyone who has blurred it, or whether it just becomes another spectacle that changes nothing.
That would be the point, right? To show the public what happens when certain lines are crossed—not just tell them the consequences but put them front and center.
That's how it worked in the Old West. Public executions were common for serious crimes because the goal was deterrence through visible consequences, and to make clear that laws existed and would be enforced when broken. Children were often brought along on the theory that seeing it firsthand left a deeper mark than simply hearing about it.
Granted, it was a different time. Enforcing the law was far harder, and authority itself was less established—you had to work harder to make it stick.
It was also a different country. People were different. Sentiments were different.
The public largely accepted that certain lines carried real consequences. Sure, sympathies for the condemned existed, but it rarely overrode the sentence itself or turned the crime itself into a lesser concern.
That restraint is harder to find now.
We have people openly celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk or treating Christa Pike's torture-murder or Lindsay Clancy's killing of her own children as occasions for primary sympathy directed at the perpetrators.
We live in an era of the great, "But..."
The expectation that some acts and their consequences forfeit sympathy, and the public at large will enforce the forfeit, has faded for too many.
Does broadcasting Nidal Hasan's execution offer any kind of reset? If it doesn't—if it only fans the flames of the current outcry—then what, exactly, would be the point?
I am not saying don't do it. I'm asking why do it.
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© 2026 Jim Bauer/The Springboard. All rights reserved.
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