Nancy Grace attacks veterans with PTSD

Nancy Grace attacks veterans with PTSD
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
February 13, 2013

Before the State of the Union address before Congress, news came out that another Sheriff's Deputy was killed in the line of duty and another one was in surgery because an ex-cop decided law enforcement officials needed to die.

I was flipping back and forth to find out what was going on and Anderson Cooper was on a split screen with Nancy Grace on CNN.

Nancy Grace breaks the news that alleged cop killer (name removed) may have died Tuesday in the mountains of Big Bear, CA, ending the statewide manhunt.

While multiple law enforcement sources told CNN earlier that (the cop killer's) body is believed to be in a burned cabin, authorities now say the rubble is too hot to examine.

During discussing what cop-killer had done, Grace brought up PTSD. The cop-turned-killer was also an Iraq veteran. Grace proved she knows absolutely nothing about PTSD when she made it sound as if veterans with PTSD should not be allowed to even be on the streets. (I spent the last couple of hours searching for a video on what I saw last night and as soon as I find it, I'll update it here.)

When people like her say such terrible things about our veterans because a minority of them get into trouble, it hurts all of them. Does Grace know that law enforcement is the number one job veterans take along with being firefighters? That many of these officers are also members of the National Guards? Does she understand that veterans are more likely to harm themselves than someone else or have a frickin clue how many combat veterans we have in this country that do not do anything wrong?

Grace-less made is seem as if veterans with PTSD are all too dangerous to walk the streets!

All the talk about guns and PTSD veterans leaves them out of getting help. People like her would make it impossible for a PTSD veteran to keep their jobs as police officers and deputies. The vast majority of them are fantastic and since I spend most of my time with armed veterans with PTSD, I can assure you that what the cop-killer did was out of the ordinary.

Grace said that the military would have know the cop-killer had PTSD and shouldn't have been allowed on the police force. Sure that made sense if you happened to be as uninformed as she is. The truth is less than half of the veterans needing help for PTSD feel comfortable enough to even ask for it. The very fact that their jobs are threatened is one of the reasons they will not ask for help. They fear losing their military careers as well as public servant jobs because people like Grace shoot off their mouths to audiences with even less knowledge.

As with mental illness, the talk now is taking guns away from anyone with mental illness even though again the minority of them commit crimes. They are far more likely to harm themselves than anyone else or become a victim of a crime committed by others.

We're a smarter nation than that. It is high time the people like Grace actually learn what they are talking about before them make it worse on veterans with PTSD. Out of the over 21 million veterans we have in this country we read about few of them committing crimes at all yet Grace attacks PTSD veterans that happen to be an even smaller percentage of veterans. The basic fact is that the members of the media being paid to do their jobs take the easy way out on reporting on them and end up attacking veterans instead of honoring them.