Commentary
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Oct. 7 announced that the United States military would make the execution of the Fort Hood shooter available for the public to watch. The Pentagon subsequently confirmed that the execution would be livestreamed.
The man scheduled to die is Nidal Malik Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. He was convicted of premeditated murder in 2013 and sentenced to death.
During the shooting, Hasan was shot by law enforcement and paralyzed from the waist down. He has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.
His execution by firing squad is reportedly scheduled for Dec. 3. President Donald Trump on Oct. 15 announced that the execution would not be livestreamed after all. I believe Trump made the right decision, and he deserves acknowledgment for changing course.
But I am disturbed that we were having this conversation in the first place. How did we become a society where otherwise decent, well-meaning people think watching a paralyzed man get shot to death should be available on their phones?
I am not defending Hasan. What he did was horrific, and I have no intention of minimizing the suffering of his victims or their families. Nor am I interested in making this an argument for or against the death penalty.
The question is this: When did watching another human being die become entertainment?
I remember when Steve Irwin, the Australian wildlife conservationist, was killed by a stingray while filming underwater in 2006. He was a husband and a father, and his death was shocking.
At the time, everyone seemed to be talking about the footage of his death. This was before disturbing videos simply appeared in your social media feed. If you wanted to see something, you had to go looking for it.
And I did.
I remember finding a video that claimed to show his death. I pressed play, and almost immediately I slammed my computer shut. What am I doing? Why would I want to watch this man die?
I had deliberately searched for it, found it, and then realized that I didn’t actually want to see it. Something inside me recoiled at the thought of watching another human being take his last breath.
I later learned that many of the videos circulating online were likely fakes, scams, or attempts to drive traffic to websites. I have no idea whether what I found was authentic, and frankly, it doesn’t matter.
The important part is that I went looking for something I thought I wanted to see, only to realize, when confronted with the possibility of actually witnessing it, that I didn’t.
That was 20 years ago. Today, I wonder how many people would have that same reaction.
Have we become so accustomed to watching violence, humiliation, pornography, and human suffering that the instinct to look away is disappearing?
We have raised generations on increasingly realistic video games where killing is rewarded with points, pornography where increasingly extreme acts are available at the touch of a button, and an internet where actual human suffering competes for our attention with cooking videos and dancing teenagers.
I am not suggesting that everyone who plays a violent video game or watches pornography becomes violent. But I do wonder whether decades of consuming human beings as entertainment have changed our relationship with suffering.
When I was growing up, snuff films were discussed as something horrifying. The idea that someone might actually be murdered on camera for the entertainment of others seemed like one of the darkest things imaginable. Now, we are discussing whether our own government should provide the footage.
Secretary Hegseth argued that people needed to understand there were serious consequences for acts like Hasan’s. I understand the desire to demonstrate that terrorism will be punished.
But does watching a man in a wheelchair being executed actually accomplish that? Does it bring back the 13 people he murdered? Does it heal the families? Does it make us safer? Or does it simply satisfy something in us that perhaps we should be trying to resist?
I think about the videos terrorist organizations have released over the years. Men kneeling in front of cameras. Hostages dressed in orange. Executions staged specifically to be watched, shared, and remembered. We recognized those videos as barbaric. The camera was part of the violence, and the audience was part of the intended effect.
But we don’t even have to look at terrorist propaganda to see where this road leads. We can look at governments that still conduct public executions.
According to Amnesty International, in 2025 only two countries had documented public judicial executions: Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Iran publicly executed at least 11 people, and Afghanistan executed six.
In December 2025, tens of thousands of people gathered in a stadium in Afghanistan to watch the Taliban execute a man convicted of murdering 13 members of a family, including children. He was shot to death by a relative of the victims.
Think about that for a moment. A man convicted of murdering 13 people, executed by gunfire, while the public gathered to watch.
Does that sound familiar?
There are obvious differences between the American military justice system and the Taliban’s courts. But the question I am asking isn’t whether the convicted murderer deserves punishment. It is why a government would want to turn that punishment into something for the public to watch.
For decades, Americans have looked at public executions in countries like Iran and Afghanistan as evidence of societies that have failed to separate justice from spectacle. And recently, we were preparing to put an execution on a livestream, where the audience wouldn’t be limited to a stadium. It could include millions of people around the world watching on their phones.
If we don’t want to become what we hate, we cannot begin imitating the things we condemn.
America once held public hangings that attracted enormous crowds. Over time, executions moved behind prison walls as public attitudes changed. Have we progressed so far technologically that we are now moving backward morally? Instead of gathering around a gallows, we can gather around a screen. And unlike a public hanging 150 years ago, a livestream can be recorded, shared, and replayed indefinitely.
I am raising children on a ranch where death is part of everyday life. My children have buried animals they loved. They understand that the animals we raise sometimes become the food on our table. I don’t believe children should be sheltered from the reality of death.
But there is an enormous difference between understanding death as part of life and consuming death as entertainment. One teaches responsibility, gratitude, and reverence for life. The other risks turning suffering into a product.
It is possible to believe someone deserves punishment without wanting to witness their suffering. It is possible to support the death penalty and still believe that an execution should not become a public performance.
We live in a time when almost anything can be filmed, uploaded, and distributed to millions of people within seconds. Technology has given us the ability to witness nearly everything, but it has not necessarily given us the wisdom to decide what is worth witnessing.
I wonder what this constant exposure is doing to our humanity. Are we becoming more informed, more compassionate, and more capable of understanding suffering? Or are we becoming numb to it?
Twenty years ago, I went looking for a video of a man dying, and the moment I pressed play, I realized I didn’t want to see it. I hope my children would have that same instinct. I hope we are still capable of recognizing that another human being’s final moments are not entertainment, even when that human being has committed terrible crimes.
President Trump was right to turn off the camera. Now, perhaps the rest of us should ask why so many people wanted it turned on.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
