NYT Wants You To Know: Percentage-wise, Hasan Was Hardly Ever Homicidal

November 9th, 2009 7:31 AM

Check out the headline from on the front page of the hard-copy New York City edition of today's New York Times:

After Years of Growing Tension, 7 Minutes of Bloodshed

The article reports that Nidal Malik Hasan began feeling disgruntled with the Army as far back as 2004.

Let's see, there are 525,948 minutes in a year. If Hasan's been feeling "tension" for about five years, that makes about 2,629,740 tension-filled minutes.  And during that entire period, he only engaged in a homicidal rampage for seven minutes.  I mean, come on, he was only a murderer for some tiny, tiny fraction of 1% of the time!  

To put things in better perspective, Nidal Malik Hasan only murdered one person per roughly 202,287 minutes of disgruntlement endured.

Before we add, by prosecuting him for murder, to the anti-Muslim harrassment poor Nidal has suffered, perhaps the Times will nominate him for some kind of medal for the admirable restraint he manifested.

Note: the online edition of the same article is headlined "Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage."  Perhaps an editor realized just how grotesque the hard-copy headline was. But by then, it had hit the streets.