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You may remember that several months ago, in California Sikh Parminder Singh Shergill was killed by police when he threatened them with a knife. He was a combat veteran, and of course, everyone in the media and his family blamed “PTSD” and the government’s failure to treat him properly for the incident, like this headline from New India Times<\/a>;<\/p>\n

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And this line from the Sacramento Bee<\/a>;<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the Lodi police who let this young man down,\u201d [Kuldeep Dhatt, president of Lodi\u2019s Sikh Temple] said. \u201cIt\u2019s the country. He was a veteran, and he didn\u2019t receive proper treatment. A young man\u2019s life is lost. It\u2019s a wrongful death however you look at it. But we have to move forward and start looking for solutions, and that was what we hoped this meeting would accomplish.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, we got his military records and he may have had mental problems, but it probably wasn’t PTS. He was a Gulf War I veteran, but he was a generator mechanic in a support battalion;<\/p>\n

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I find it difficult to believe that anything happened to him in that position that would cause him to have PTS. But, hey, PTS explains everything, right? All veterans are victims. And the explanation lets the police off the hook for not using something less lethal than bullets on a crazed veteran Sikh with a knife.<\/p>\n

As long as everything a veteran does is somehow related to PTS, we’re never going to overcome the myths that revolve around veterans and the “crazed veteran” stereotypes. This guy was probably a little crazy, but it wasn’t related to being a generator mechanic in a support battalion for five months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may remember that several months ago, in California Sikh Parminder Singh Shergill was killed by … Parminder Singh Shergill and the crazed vet myth<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Parminder-Singh-Shergill.jpg?fit=620%2C779&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}