Nidal Malik Hassan It was a casual introduction, as Lampasan Skip Jones remembers: “This is so-and-so, who is a major out at Fort Hood.”

The encounter occurred on a Sunday, in early September.

The location: Stan’s Shooting Range, near Florence and approximately seven miles south of Briggs.

Jones, a longtime Lampasas County resident and a veteran printer, volunteers as a safety officer at the range, which accommodates persons who shoot shotguns, pistols and rifles.

The person Jones had met, Nidal Malik Hasan -- a psychiatrist at Darnall Army Medical Center -- on Thursday would go on a rampage at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing site, killing 13 people and wounding about 30.

In an interview with the Lampasas Dispatch Record on Friday, Jones said he believed the weapon Hasan allegedly used to mow down so many of his fellow servicemen could have been the FN 5.7x25 semiautomatic pistol he used so adeptly at the range. (Weekend published reports referred to the weapon as the FN FiveSeveN pistol.)

The firearm, manufactured by a Belgian company, holds 20 rounds in its clip, or magazine, news accounts said.

Hasan, 39, was in critical but stable condition at press time Monday, after having been shot by post police. Hasan is a devout Muslim born in Arlington, Va., to Palestinian parents from the West Bank, said The Washington Post.

Jones said neither he nor the range’s owners were suspicious of Hasan. “We have people come out there of every nationality,” he said. “That didn’t make us question anything at all.

“You figure ‘a major and a [psychiatrist].’ You don’t think anything’s wrong. He was always polite to us and to everybody else shooting.”

Later, Jones added: “We don’t consider race, color, creed. Everybody’s the same as everybody else.”

One of the range’s two owners did note with astonishment, however, that his guest was shooting a smaller target than normal, a 12-inch by 12-inch rifle target, very accurately at 100 yards without the benefit of a scope -- a quite remarkable feat.

Most people shoot targets on a pistol range at 25 yards -- or even closer, Jones said. Even at that, they typically fire at silhouettes of a body, on 21-inch by 42-inch paper.

“He had open sights,” Jones recalls. “It was very unusual to see someone shooting at 100 yards with open sights.

“I said something about it to one of the owners. I couldn’t see how he could see that far.”

Jones remembers seeing Hasan, always by himself, at the range several times -- though he believes he showed up even more than the three or four times Jones saw him there.

When he heard news reports of the mass killings at the Fort Hood Army post -- located about 30 miles east of Lampasas -- Jones reacted with disbelief.

“You just can’t believe that somebody would do that,” he said.

As investigators are seeking clues into the worst mass shooting in history at an American military base, Jones has questions, too.

“I kind of wonder why he did it, but that’s not going to come out unless he tells them.”

As Hasan strode into the Fort Hood deployment center about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, he screamed “Allahu Akbar” -- “God is great” in Arabic -- before he opened fire, witnesses said.

He reportedly had been upset about an impending deployment to Afghanistan, news accounts stated. Other news stories reported that Hasan was to be deployed to Iraq.

Federal officials are investigating whether Hasan authored Internet postings that came to their attention about six months ago which discussed suicide bombings and other threats, the New York Post reported.

One posting mentioned soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their colleagues. “Scholars have paralleled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers,” the author wrote.

Hasan, who attended Virginia Tech -- the site of a campus massacre in 2007 -- in recent years expressed his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Retired Col. Terry Lee, who said he had worked with Hasan, told Fox News that the Army major “would make comments to other individuals about how we should not be in the war in the first place.”

Said Lee: “He said maybe Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor. At first, we thought he meant help the armed forces, but apparently, that wasn’t the case.”

The Army psychiatrist’s aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, Va., told The Washington Post that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hasan endured years of name-calling and harassment about his Muslim faith and sought a discharge from the military.

A cousin, Nader Hasan, told Fox, in a statement issued on behalf of family members: “We are shocked and saddened by the terrible events at Fort Hood. We send the families of the victims our most heartfelt sympathies.”

The Fort Hood major was transferred to the Central Texas Army post after spending six years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He did an internship, a residency and a fellowship in “disaster and preventative psychiatry” at Walter Reed, The Washington Post reported.

He was promoted to major in July 2008, despite having a poor performance evaluation, news accounts state. In 2009, he was told to report to Texas for duty.

Said the Austin American- Statesman: “The call to serve in Iraq followed and, according to U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison -- based on a briefing she received about the killings -- Hasan appeared to be upset about that.”

Reflecting on last week’s chaotic, tragic turn of events at Fort Hood, Skip Jones, the Florence shooting range’s volunteer safety officer, said: “It’s a waste of life.”

Said the Lampasas resident: “[In] any shooting, the gun doesn’t sit on the table and say, ‘I’m going to shoot a bunch of people today.’ It’s the person who shoots it.

“The gun is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. In the case yesterday, it was used for evil.”