Hegseth vows public firing-squad execution for Fort Hood shooter

Ellen Milligan, Bloomberg News on Oct 8, 2026

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who killed 13 people in a mass shooting in 2009, would be visible to the public.

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said on the Real America’s Voice network on Thursday. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire at the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center in Killeen, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 32 others before he was subdued on November 5, 2009. He was sentenced by a military court to death after confessing to the shooting.

The shooting occurred at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hasan, who is Muslim, had become radicalized against the U.S. role in the conflict. He was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan later that month.

Hasan will be executed on December 3 at Fort Hood on a Thursday at 1 pm Texas time, to mirror the date and timing that the shooting took place 17 years ago, Hegseth said.

President Donald Trump approved the execution last week — a decision Hegseth described on Thursday as a “no brainer.” Soldiers with rifles will carry out the execution, he said.

Executing someone by firing squad, and doing so in public view, would mark an unprecedented event in modern U.S. history. The last U.S. military execution came 65 years ago, and the last by firing squad is believed to have been carried out in 1945, when an Army private was shot for desertion during World War II in France.

The final documented public execution in the U.S. took place nine years earlier, in 1936, when a man convicted of rape was hanged in Kentucky in front of thousands of spectators.