re: #16 Anymouse 🌹🎃

I kind of dislike the way “veterans are somehow responsible for mass shooting” frames.

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This argument includes things like JROTC as “military adjacent.”

pewresearch.org (percentage of veterans is approximately 10% of the population, not counting active duty, reservists, National Guard, &c)

Wingnut militias aim at recruiting veterans.

This is the left’s version of the right-wing video game argument. Are some veterans killers? Sure. Do they represent an outsized proportion of all killers? Probably not.

Currently, about 9 of ten veterans are men. The absolute number of veterans is expected to fall, while the percentage of women is expected to double in the next few years.

A more accurate representation would be men make up the vast majority of killers, not veterans.

A lot of news outlets link PTSD with mass murders (as if PTSD was a phenomenon which only occurs to military personnel). In the past, before PTSD was defined well, it was associated with “cowardice.” (It is one of those mental illnesses that Trump wants to have executed though.)

This article
connectingvets.radio.com
talks about the Thousand Oaks murderer. They cite an ABC report, getting the statistics wrong because the network was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and their statistics are about Australia.

The article talks about access to military training and firearms in Australia. Since firearms are well regulated after the Port Arthur massacre, I think they missed it by that much (firearms regulations, not PTSD). And it’s not like every yahoo in the USA can’t get access to guns.

Prior to 9/11, the worst mass-murder was the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh didn’t use a gun; he used fertilizer and fuel oil. After that, the Feds immediately put licensing and restrictions on who could buy fertilizer and how much at a time.

And Australia has military vets with PTSD, and they don’t go on shooting rampages. Are American veterans somehow different?

The problem isn’t the military persay. The problem is that the military, like so many other institutions in our country, have been fully absorbed into the white supremacy structure that is underlaid beneath damn near everything in this country, but especially coming back with a vengeance the last couple of decades or so it seems.