{"id":37705,"date":"2013-09-26T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T09:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37705"},"modified":"2013-09-26T05:43:15","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T09:43:15","slug":"media-and-the-angry-vet-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37705","title":{"rendered":"Media and the angry vet myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our buddy, Alex Horton, wrote in Defense One “When Will the Media Stop Fueling the Angry Vet Narrative?<\/a>” a favorite subject of ours. Horton tries to separate Nidal Hasan and Aaron Alexis from their veteran labels, but that will probably never happen. Remember James Wenneker von Brunn? He was the 88-year-old who shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in June 2009 with the intention of killing a lot more people, but he was stopped by those security guards. The first thing out of the media’s collective mouth was that he was a veteran. von Brunn had been a veteran of freakin’ World War II and hadn’t served since, but it was easier for the media to understand that he did it because he was a veteran.<\/p>\n

Then the was Wade Michael Page who shot up a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. He was a veteran – he was a Hawk Missile repairman from 1992 to 1998 and was booted with a general discharge for being drunk on duty and AWOL. But, see, he’d wore a uniform, so he was a veteran and that made it all understandable to the press.<\/p>\n

There was Benjamin Colton Barnes who shot two Park Rangers in Washington State last year was a pogue and never heard a shot fired in anger during his service, which ended ignobly, too, but CNN and others loved to show the picture of him with scary black guns and tats<\/a>. They even warned the public that he was highly trained in survival skills – but he was found dead of hypothermia face down in a stream. Hypothermia is covered on Day One of any survival training. I’m sure that sticking your face in water is pretty near the beginning of the class, too.<\/p>\n

If you watch this video released by the FBI of Aaron Alexis on the prowl in the Navy Yard, veterans can tell the clown had no training in closing with and destroying people;<\/p>\n