Untwisting Reality

Mass Shootings – a Pattern that Marks the American Way of Life

• By Poetry X
• 5 April, 2014
• No Comments

Killing is the business and business is great – that is the slogan of the day behind the executive doors of the guns and psychotropic drugs industries. The brand new shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas makes this pattern of mass shooting more evident – two shootings in the same exact place and this time it left three soldiers dead and 16 wounded with the shooter killing himself. The first shooting was back in 2009 where Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people. At the time the press, in no time, accused Hassan as an “Islamist terrorist” but this time the gunman is a Latino man and since Latinos represent a sizable portion of the armed forces the media had to try to find the actual reason for such a tragedy -investigators stated they haven’t found any links to any kind of terrorism.

34-year-old Spc. Ivan Lopez was an infantry soldier who had been deployed twice, including a four-month stint in Iraq as a truck driver. As often happens with soldiers who have been deployed multiple times, Lopez had signs of mental illness – Lopez had reported that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was undergoing diagnosis procedures for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) yet he had been prescribed the sedative Ambien. There are multiple components that led to this bloody event but each component is protected by interest groups. As usual, the NRA (National Rifle Association) will make sure the gun industry keeps selling guns to anybody including mentally unstably people like Hasan and Lopez (both got the guns from the same store) and even terrorist who are in the watch list. Let’s not even mention the pharmaceutical industry which in no time had Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former senior FBI profiler, defending the drug Ambien not to be blamed for the shooting. The other factor is the army itself that spends billions of dollars in weaponry but throw only the left overs to the actual soldiers, specially when it comes to their mental recuperation [CNN Apr 3-2014].  Furthermore, ironically congress had just passed a bill to cut veterans benefits for $6B over the next ten years [Washington Time Jan 19-2014] – yes, that’s how much we appreciate the sacrifice our soldiers do for out country.

Let’s consider about 20% (of more than 2M troops) who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have some kind of mental illness. Over a half of them,  712,000 veterans from both wars who have sought medical treatment since leaving military service. Nearly a third of veterans may suffer from PTSD. Of the 109,000 casualties since combat in Iraq and Afghanistan began, only 6,200 troops have been killed. Among those were 298 war-zone suicides. Overall, it reported 2,300 active-duty suicides since 2001.  42% (nearly 1M troops) of all service members sent to the combat zones, have been deployed at least twice. There were 1,621 suicide attempts by men and 247 by women who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, with 94 men and 4 women dying, in average 22 veterans commit suicide every day [ArmyTimes.com Feb 12-2013].  Just in 2009, suicides exceeded deaths in combat. [McClatchy DC October 4-2011] Sadly, neither those numbers nor the continuous shootings seem to be sufficient evidence to compel the government to take down the powerful lobby groups.