Attacking Our Defenders

The following post was published January 17, 2008 in response to the NY Times article proclaiming our Veterans as psychotic killers.  The pertinence of this article is revived with the recent arguments defending the DHS/Napolitano memo.  It should be noted that the NYTimes article presented our Troops as being unable to control violent psychosis, which is fully debunked by their own "evidence," but none of their evidence demonstrated propensity to terrorism.

ORIGINAL:

Most here are already aware that the NYTimes devoted an inordinate amount of space to portraying our returning veterans as psychotic killers, unable to adjust to civilian life.  Most in my circle of contacts are also very aware that the NYTimes does not hide its politics very well.  They are anti-gun, anti-war and anti-Bush.  They gave moveon,org a discount for their ad attacking General Petreaus.  I’ll come back to the main focus of this article which is the article attacking our troops in a minute but let me provide some background on war and warriors first.

 

War changes people.  There is no doubt about that.  All extreme situations in life have a profound effect on those that experience them and war is several extremes combined.  Life and death are decided in split seconds.  The enemy desires and often attempts to kill you.  War never takes place in tourist destinations.  The terrain and environment are always extreme.  Prisoners have better living conditions than Soldiers.

 It is unnatural to take the life of a member of the same species but a warrior must come to grips with the NEED to do so.  The warrior is exposed to the worst humans can do.  Our enemies commit both the most severe atrocities as well as the most base of civil rights restrictions.  When a warrior is faced with all of this, his naiveté is lost.  He knows the frailty of life and the necessity of killing.  He knows that if unchecked, evil will overcome those he desires to protect from all of these realities.

 

War is the extremes of boredom and adrenaline packed exhilaration.  It alternates between them with no warning.  When you see no enemy, you are in the most danger.  This changes the way a veteran thinks and acts.  Not all learn to manage these changes in themselves.

 

Somewhere between 1 and 3% of our population are psychotic.  They are not just willing to kill, they desire to do so.  The military attempts to weed out the psychotic.  Recruiters are trained to see the signs and avoid their recruitment.  Drill Sergeants are trained to be observant for the signs and weed them out.  Soldiers are trained to watch for warning signs and report them.  Nevertheless, some will slip into the system.

 

LTC Grossman identifies all of this very well in his book “On Killing” and its sequel “On Combat.”  He describes the differences between our military and law enforcement and criminals and terrorists very well in his excerpt “On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs” on his webpage www.killology.com He has studied it extensively and is the pre-eminent researcher on PTSD.

 

 

We MUST provide the best training to our troops.  We MUST support our troops.  And when they have done our bidding, we MUST give them the tools to overcome their shift back into “civilized” society.  NONE of this is accomplished by the recent attacks on our troops in the NYTimes.

 

 With the Virginia Tech Shootings still fresh on the minds of academicians, the electorate and our politicians, there is currently a push to prevent a similar psychotic killer from legally attaining a gun again.  The killer in that case had a long history of mental health issues.  A judge had already declared him a danger and by entering that into the record, the killer should have been entered into the list of people that cannot buy guns.  That is already the law. 

 

Congress is attempting to expand that law.  Included in the expansion of this law is a provision to put all members of the military treated for PTSD on the same list that the VT killer should have been on.  This law would remove the 2^nd Amendment rights of those who have risked their lives in order to protect ALL of our rights.  Who in their right mind would support removing the rights EARNED by those who have protected the rights each of us was lucky enough to been born into.

 

 

The extreme left of the aisle wishes to do away with the 2^nd Amendment altogether.  The more people they can get banned from owning guns, the more guns they can get banned, the closer they get to that goal.  But they have realized they cannot do this in one fell swoop.  As long as you can convince the American people that it is someone else who’s guns are being taken away, they’ll go along with removing guns from psychotic killers.

 

 Few would actually espouse taking away the gun rights from the best trained gunhandlers in the world, warriors who have risked all, stood up to tyranny and terrorists in defense of those rights we take for granted.  But who would oppose removing guns from the hands of psychotic killers who cannot control their actions? 

 

So, the NY Times set out to once again portray our Soldiers and Marines in the worst possible light.  They devoted several pages of their Toilet Paper to portraying our combat veterans as alcoholic, drug addicted psychotics that cannot be trusted to run their own lives in a padded room much less be allowed to carry guns in ‘civilized’ society.  To do this, they searched the court records, newspapers and police reports of the entire nation and came up with 121 cases where a veteran killed someone.

I would first point you to the case of SGT Sepi, a Navajo who served his term of service with honor despite the fact that he was involved in one of the most likely causes of PTSD.  SGT Sepi made a life or death decision, ending the life of an Iraqi that appeared to be emplacing an IED that would kill his fellow Soldiers.  It turned out the suspicious activity was not enemy activity and that would haunt him, in part because his fellow Soldiers understood the action for what it was and it wasn’t discussed with them.

 

But SGT Sepi did not go on a murderous rampage.  He attempted to deal with the guilt by himself.  He did not back down from danger.  He moved to Las Vegas and got a civilian job, living in conditions not so different than those he experienced in Iraq.  He lived in a gang infested part of town in a room literally with a hole in the wall.  Knowing the dangers, he packed an AK-47 under his trenchcoat when he went down to the store to get himself a couple of cans of beer, though underage.

 

 And though he had broken the law twice that night (beer and concealed weapon), he wasn’t violent and he wasn’t looking for a fight when a couple of gangbangers from the Crips and Naked City Gangs confronted them.  He tried to walk away but they figured since each of them weighed in at nearly twice his weight and both wear packing weapons, they had found their prey. 

 

Perhaps it was the cocaine and alcohol that made them choose to pick on this combat veteran of small stature.  But when the shooting stopped our young war hero walked away and two criminals lay bleeding in the alley.  Criminals hate it when you fight back.  Despite all he had experienced, SGT Sepi tried to walk away but he refused to be the victim.  He chose to live.  He should be given a medal.  He acted in self-defense and we can strike his case off the list.  Now we’re down to 120.  But compare that story to how it’s told in their individual case stories.

 

To do this correctly, I would need to look up each of the original stories to find out how many more fall into similar misportrayals, but for now, I will use the information the NYT’s provide us.  I’m rushing to beat Bill O’Reilly to this story.  Someone told me he is already on it for tonight’s show.  He did not coordinate with me though.  Worse yet, I may have missed the deadline and it appears I don’t even get Fox on my “free” cable.

 

Based on their OWN information, there are only 32 convicted murders in their 121 cases.  Included in their cases are 25 others charged with murder and 7 acquittals.  In our nation, the law says we are innocent until PROVEN guilty.  In 7 of the cases (at least), the veteran was acting in self-defense.   In at least 21 cases, the veteran maintains his innocence.  In 22 of the cases, it was a DUI case that resulted in death.  In at least 5 of the cases, the person had been thrown out of the military.

 

In at least two of the cases and it looks likely for 3 more, the veteran was involved in gang activity and in 9 cases drugs were involved.  These are indicative, not of military service but other outside forces.  In 16 of the cases more than one veteran was charged and listed separately to come to their number of 121.  Many of these veterans should have been weeded out of the military for mental issues or criminal associations prior to deployment to combat.

 

But let’s look at the 57 cases where our veterans are currently charged with or convicted of murder, even if they are one of several accused in the same case.  This already is an inflated number due to the double counting.  There are currently approximately 1.5 million members of the military.  There are currently approximately 1.5 million combat veterans of our current wars.

 

 Every year, the FBI publishes crime statistics for America and its cities.  One category is Non-negligent homicide.  This includes murder and the purposeful killing of other human beings but not death by DUI or accidental shootings (some of which are included in our number of 57).  There are more combat veterans than the 1.4 million Philidelphia residents but Philidelphia had 406 homicides in 2006 alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia%2C_Pennsylvania

 

 Since the NYT is compiling several years, we have to somehow accommodate that in our comparison.  If we average out the number of murders of the two known years 2002 (288 and the lowest on record) and 2006 and multiply that average by the five years covered in the NYT article, the comparison would be 1,535 homicides in Philadelphia compared to 57 by our combat veterans.  If on the other hand we were to divide our 57 by 5 years (and it’s actually longer), we would compare 11.4 murders by our combat veterans to the 406 in Philadelphia.  

 

 In other words, a citizen of Philadelphia is more than 35 times more likely to be murdered inside their city limits than anyone is to be killed by our PTSD suffering veterans.  But these numbers don’t take into account that the city of Philadelphia is shrinking in population while the number of combat veterans continues to grow at a brisk pace. 

 

I would gladly compare the 2006 numbers to each other, but the NYT does not provide dates for ALL of the crimes it cites.  A quick look makes it appear that there were 20 murders charged in 2006 by combat veterans but this is an imprecise number because the NYT did not provide dates for all of the cases and I did not filter each of the stories for acquittals and such.  But even comparing that number of 20 to 406 in Philadelphia, you're more than 20x more likely to be killed in Philadelphia than by a combat veteran.

 

That puts the murder rate (as inflated as it is) of combat veterans at 1.3 per 100,000 which is the same method used to report murder rates by the law enforcement.  Philadelphia has a murder rate of 17.3 and Detroit a rate of 47.3  The safest of our big cities with 257,000 residents is Plano, TX with a murder rate of 1.6, still more dangerous than hanging out with our veterans.

 

Oh, by the way, the city of Brotherly Love is overwhelmingly on the left side of the aisle. 75.5% of its registered voters are registered as Democrats.  Only 15.16% are registered Republican.  It’s not likely to have a bunch of combat veterans running around there but instead should be sitting around talking out their problems rather than shooting each other up.

 

 With all of this being said, the safest place to be (despite what NYT may tell you) is as close to a combat veteran as possible.  He’s likely to have a gun and know how to use it.  In fact, he’s likely to use that knowledge to keep you safe, even if he doesn’t know you. 

 

Which reminds me, one of our 57 is charged with murder because he was doing exactly that.  When he came to the rescue of a woman being harassed in a bar parking lot, he was attacked by a 3^rd man.  In self-defense, the 3^rd man was stabbed and died.  Our knight in beer soaked armor was thrown in jail and is now being used to tell you how dangerous we are.  If one of our combat veterans doesn’t have a gun with him, he’ll still protect with what he does have on hand.

  

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