PTSD is not the enemy no matter what reporters say

Reading the Huffington Post article by Zachary Bell The Perils of Ignoring Military PTSD and Violence it pretty much put me in the same mood I was in this morning when I woke up. Angry!

I am so tired of reporters getting away with being so lazy they just want to lump every veteran with PTSD together as soon as one of them commits a crime. It is all so easy for them and they never consider how much harm they are doing. They also never consider how very wrong they are.

So to hell with them.

After the shooting at Fort Hood there have been too many articles ripping veterans apart and I am done trying to figure out their motives.

All they had to do was actually look at the hard numbers we already know about to know that soldiers/veterans committing crimes hardly ever happens. The numbers prove it is a load of crap.

First take a look at the Veterans Population by State for your state. See the number of veterans in your state. Of the almost 23 million veterans in this country the VA says;

"The Veterans Health Administration is America’s largest integrated health care system with over 1,700 sites of care, serving 8.76 million Veterans each year."

California has the most veterans. As of September 2013 the VA said there are 1,795,455. California followed by Texas at 1,667,740 and 3rd is Florida with 1,520,563. How many reports do you read about them doing anything wrong?

Which means most veterans do not go to the VA. It also means that out of almost 23 million veterans, we're not reading about them committing crimes as much as we're reading about them committing suicide and even less reading about them just going to work and raising families. We don't read enough about them being homeless or how they ended up living on the streets after serving the country. But hey, reporters can spin the story anyway they want to.

There are over 2 million veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq but again, few reports of them committing crimes. There are about a million serving today so when something like the shooting at Fort Hood happens, reporters can avoid mentioning that fact.

They want to pretend they know something the rest of us don't know. Considering they make it up as they go along, that is pretty easy to do. We know facts, they know spin and whatever headline they think will get them the most hits.

Next time you read anything about veterans, just remember what the numbers prove and then leave a comment where the reporter has avoided facts. Clue them in that you know a lot more than they do. Maybe they'll get fired! Maybe they'll finally open their eyes to what the real truth is. I doubt it but it is worth a try.