To the editor:

I am not sure what Charles Krauthammer is getting at in his piece “Religion clearly part of Fort Hood story.”

Has he just noticed that people often do horrible things in the name of religion?

In my own Christian tradition, a man just shot a fellow Christian at the victim’s church for religious reasons. Christians also slaughtered Muslims in Bosnia.

A Hindu extremist killed Gandhi, and Hindus and Muslims killed each other wholesale at the time of the partition.

A rabbinical student killed the prime minister of Israel for religious reasons.

So it goes on.

Alas, you can’t be protected by avoiding religious people. Neither Timothy McVeigh nor Seung-Hui Cho (the Virginia Tech shooter) expressed any religious motivation.

Clearly there were signs that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in the recent Fort Hood massacre, was a dangerous person. I don’t know that it would be an easy thing to decide when to give up trying to help someone, and when to destroy his career and send him out.

Still, dangerous people, not Muslims, are the problem.