AmmoLand – by Roger J. KatzNew York, N.Y. –-(Ammoland.com)- Some time ago the Wall Street Journal wrote an opinion piece – an expose that appeared in the May 24th-25th Weekend Review Section, titled “Duty and Pity.”
The WSJ author, Phil Klay, wrote “. . . there is something deeply unsettling about the way we so often choose to think about those who served.”
Klay says that we choose to pity our returning soldiers. But, as he adds, “pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we’re comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person’s experience to a sound bite.”
Klay points out that something sinister is going on here. And, what it is feeds into the goal of antigun groups and their allied politicians who, as we know, seek to separate Americans from their guns.
“This insistence on treating veterans as objects of pity plays out in our national dialogue . . . whether it is Bill Maher saying on his April 4 HBO show, ‘Anytime you send anyone to war, they come back a little crazy,’ or a Washington Times article about PTSD claiming that, ‘Roughly 2.6 million veterans who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD-type symptoms.’ That is roughly the total number of veterans who served, which suggests that the report thought there might be a 100% saturation rate of PTSD among veterans.”
Now, let us extrapolate from this.
The antigun crowd and much of the mainstream media treat returning soldiers as “broken” and as “ticking time bombs,” even as they “pity” them and seek to treat them all for PTSD.
“Pity places the focus on what’s wrong with veterans. But for veterans looking at the society that sent them to war, it may not feel like they’re the ones with the most serious problem.”
Indeed, the mainstream media takes potshots at veterans every chance it gets.
“As Sgt. Dakota Meyer, a young Marine and PTSD sufferer who was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in Afghanistan, explained after the Fort Hood shooting, ‘PTSD does not put you in the mindset to go out and kill innocent people. . . . The media label this shooting PTSD, but if what that man did is PTSD, then I don’t have it.’”
And, “Kristen Rouse, a veteran and blogger who was struck by another article alerting fearful readers to ZIP Codes that have large numbers of veterans with PTSD, wrote that the article treated a PTSD database ‘like a sex offender registry.’ A recent opinion piece in the New York Times even tried to link combat trauma with membership in the Ku Klux Klan. If vets are truly ‘broken,’ . . . there is no telling what they might do.”
The Wall Street Journal adds, “this perspective is more than a little bizarre. Veterans rank among our most engaged, productive citizens.” For example, “in New York, the contributions being made by veterans couldn’t have been more apparent than after Hurricane Sandy. When the city failed to coordinate relief efforts in the Rockaways, the veteran-led relief group Team Rubicon filled the leadership gap . . . to map conditions and coordinate efforts to help people stranded in the storm. Veterans are used to creating order in chaotic environments – just the sort of people a city in a crisis needs.”
The May 24th-25th 2014 Wall Street Journal article sets the record straight on the issue of PTSD, but, it did not follow through on the invidious, and scurrilous attack on American soldiers by the antigun crowd and its allied politicians.
For the antigun crowd seeks to deny to an entire group – consisting of those Americans who should be treated as our most honored citizens – the right guaranteed to all Americans under the Second Amendment. This effort isn’t only ironic, it’s diabolical. The antigun crowd and allied politicians treat the entirety of returning soldiers as damaged goods – potential psychotic killers. In so doing, our most treasured citizens are denied the right to exercise their inalienable right under the Bill of Rights: to hold and to keep firearms.
In particular, Senator Dianne Feinstein and others of her bent, clearly see PTSD as a convenient device to preclude an entire population of Americans – veterans – from possessing guns. This is but one more tactic in the antigun politicians’ arsenal to dismember and thus defeat the Second Amendment. Of all Americans, Senator Feinstein dares to target – oddly enough – the very last group of Americans whom one would ever wish to deny the right to keep and bear arms. This is a travesty.
So, we send young Americans off to war to fight and possibly to die and Senator Dianne Feinstein and others like her dare to treat those who return as broken – damaged goods. She says in effect that our veterans cannot be trusted with firearms once they return to their Country. She says, in effect, that, for the good of the collective and for the good of the returning soldiers themselves, we must deny our veterans their sacred right to keep and bear arms. Senator Feinstein thus treats our First Class Citizens like Third Class Citizens, behind illegal Mexicans and Central Americans.
One would expect Hillary Clinton, who has committed use of U.S. military in all Middle East adventures to date, to do much the same were she to become the next U.S. President.
Ah, dulce bellum inexpertis (“War is sweet to those who have never fought”).
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Read more: http://www.ammoland.com/2014/07/vets-are-not-damaged-goods-why-do-anti-gun-groups-treat-them-like-trash/#ixzz38DtUa7H7
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