Is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan a hell-bent jihadist whose terrorist sleeper-cell plan bore its deadly fruit Thursday?

Is he a persecuted minority whose torment over U.S. war policy toppled him into a murderous, misguided act of conscientious objection?

Both emerging theories have already attracted adherents.

But before we wander off into the rhetorical wilderness, closer examination is due to the obvious: Hasan, the alleged shooter at Fort Hood, fits a stereotypical mass-killer profile like a hand in a glove. He was an isolated, angry misfit with grievances and guns.

As is our nature, we're all rushing around braying about Hasan's motive, as if opening fire on a crowded Army base serves some self-interest as obvious as an armed robber's desire for money.

He's a Muslim, ergo, terrorist! Or, he "snapped" before the awful specter of witnessing at first hand the tragic atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. war machine!

Both are facile, politically heated undercurrents in this terrible episode, although for all I know, both may contain distorted threads of truth.

But trying to mine coherent motivation from the head of a homicidal fruitcake is a pointless exercise. The real "motive" may be as simple and unsatisfying as this: He's a special kind of crazy.

The argument that Hasan is a cunning, highly trained jihadist mole seems awfully doubtful in light of the skeletal handful of facts we already have. The first rule of effective undercover work is to blend in, which this guy – who griped tirelessly about his hatred of Army life and who made repeated efforts to get out – did not.

And the intimation that all Muslims are potential terrorists and cannot be trusted in the U.S. military is a grievous insult to several thousands of our capable soldiers.

The counter-theory – that the threat of deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan is so traumatic and morally untenable that it turns sane people into monsters – is just as bogus. It's a pejorative slur on the countless soldiers who have toughened up and carried out difficult duties, and who continue to – a category that, in the interest of disclosure, includes my youngest brother.

Like other mass shooters before him (and maybe, as I write, a nutcase who opened fire in an Orlando office building Friday morning), Hasan really does seem to share particular characteristics.

He appears to be an unhappy, prickly, lonely man with no wife or kids, who angrily nursed a longstanding grudge, who didn't socialize much with co-workers, who viewed himself as a victim and an outsider – and so on.

It's a class of people from which neither Muslims nor military officers are exempt. Even psychiatrists aren't, although this tragedy does raise the question of whether it was appropriate for a doctor who so openly hated his job and had received poor performance ratings to be allowed to counsel soldiers suffering from genuine combat trauma.

His purported claims of being harassed for his faith don't quite ring true. Hasan wasn't some rivet-twisting grunt getting hazed in the barracks – he was a degreed psychiatrist of relatively high rank. Was he getting towel-snapped by the other majors in the locker room at the officers' club? Stiffed on cocktail party invites?

Those secondhand harassment complaints make just as much sense if they're the warped perceptions of an angry malcontent determined to see insult and persecution around every corner. If he used his religion to fuel his grievance, it was just another log on the bonfire.

So before we press this lunatic into service as a political symbol, let's remember that he has so far proven himself to be only one thing:

A nut with a gun.