Gunman kills 12 at U.S. Army base

Fort Hood is home to about 50,000 troops, although Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said only about 35,000 were on base at the time. The fort, established in 1942, stretches across 339 square miles (878 square km) in central Texas and is the state's largest single employer.

Base personnel have accounted for more suicides than any other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with 75 tallied through July of this year. Nine of those occurred in 2009, counting two in overseas war zones.

A former FBI criminal profiler highlighted the irony of the suspected gunman's reported expertise as a psychiatrist specializing in traumatic stress, which often affects combat soldiers.

"It may be that he succumbed to that which he was supposed to heal," Clint Van Zandt said on MSNBC.

Fort Hood is halfway between Austin and Waco, about 60 miles (97 km) from each city. Nearby Killeen was the site of one of the worst U.S. shooting rampages when a gunman drove his truck into a Luby's cafeteria in 1991 and shot 23 people to death and wounded 20 others before killing himself. (Additional reporting by James Vicini, Peter Cooney and Phil Stewart in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles) (Writing by Chris Baltimore, Editing by Peter Cooney)