That story is such a sad indication of the state of the western military today. I've got a close family member who's just been diagnosed for PTSD during his service in Rwanda '94. He just snapped in the middle of his workday, walked into his RSM's office,screamed at him for five minutes and broke down. The army is now 'investigating his options', when an expedient medical discharge is the logical, reasonable thing to allow him.

The disconnection between peacetime civilan life & military service in a conflict zone is enormous today, and the lack of debriefing & retraining that is needed to readjust is becoming a glaring and oftentimes tragic oversight.

It's not a new thing -- it just didn't get publicized in the past. For example, my great grandfather had PTSD (then just called "shell shock") after returning from WWI. He went to work one day at the oil derricks in Texas... and nobody's been able to find out what's happened since. C'est la guerre.

You know, this is one of those articles that I want to read, but can't really get myself to finish.

Family members saying their loved one is harmless to everyone except themselves aren't reliable indicators of potential violence. If they knew what they're loved ones were capable at any given moment, we'd never be reading about the "family murder/suicide" in the papers. We wouldn't always be looking at the husband the moment a wife goes missing or turns up dead.

I'll agree with that. My comment wasn't so much a criticism of police departments as a lament that our society has come to this.

Malor, a response to your post would essentially be a repeat of what I said.

Define what in your mind a reasonable response would have been. Using that it would not be hard to extrapolate a series of events starting from there that ends up bad. Sometimes bad things happen when people get drunk and play with guns. Are you blaming the family for calling 911? If not, then - my previous criticisms not withstanding - the only person that truly is a "Yokel" is the dope who had an AD at such a critical incident.

My rangemaster always used to say "there is no such thing as an accidental discharge"

Quiet, before the women hear you!

it definitely isn't a recent development at all Wordsmythe, but the problem as I see it lies in the increasing rift between modern military deployment and its relevance to civilian life. Back in the aftermath of WW1/WW2, the troops arrived home to welcome marches and were treated with the respect and dignity that someone risking their life for the sanctity of their people, country & ideology deserved. Ever since Korea, modern-day wars are become increasingly insular (to the western world at least) and have little relevance to the civilian population. Troops arrive home, see that their service had little to no positive impact (in fact in many cases a decidely negative one) on his own people and are not given the patience, support or assistance that they need to readjust to civilian life. There are still cases like your great-grandfather, who for one reason or another never fully recover from their experiences, but I think you'll find the treatment of the military at the hands of the civilian population (or even the military administration forthat matter) has a far greater impact than is being accounted for.

I think it's terrible that it happened, and it shouldn't have, but the fact remains that the guy was pointing and firing a weapon at or near policemen. You have to at least admit that, Malor, or you can't accurately describe the scenario. He did indeed threaten the policemen at several points in the situation. It's unreasonable for them to leave an unpredictable war veteran, drunk and acting belligerently, armed and uncontrolled in a residential neighborhood.

I feel dirty for even bringing that up, but it's necessary to be accurate. You seem to like dehumanizing the cops involved; I don't think that's useful to understanding the situation. Things definitely went way out of whack, but it would have been a lot easier for the police if they guy had been unarmed and calm.

Yes. This is what I meant when I said this is not a useful way to understand the situation. In your account, he's a normal guy enjoying a beer of an afternoon. But normal people don't take the actions he did in response to the arrival of the police.

I agree absolutely that things went wrong in a bad way, and since the police were in charge, they are at fault. I understand that completely. At the same time, this is not a guy who was hanging laundry when the police were called. He was not cooperative and reacted violently not once, but several times. Why he did is one thing, but ignoring *that* he did allows the situation to be cast in a very different light.

If you are upset that he was "not doing anything illegal", why no castigating of the family member that called police in, in the first place? The overall reaction here is not fair, it's not looking to reason out the events, it's just a "blame the cops" narrative, without the full story in place. I think that's wrong. Both sides were culpable.

To reiterate, I don't think anything he did in and of itself warranted a shot. But the actions he took *guaranteed* a ratcheting up of the response by the police, and any times weapons come out, the situation gets more dangerous.

I wonder how many times something similar has played out with no harm to the people involved? Probably a pretty big number.

...Not even Officer Friendly?

I agree entirely. But the thing to remember here is that he was not in a normal state of mind. He and the police both made serious mistakes. The police moreso, because they had control of the situation and how it escalated. But if he'd actually been cooperative, or even just non-responsive, things would have gone very differently.

And those were not reactions to a "a drunk guy at his father's house". They were put in place by the perceptions of the actions of the victim, which go well beyond a simple drunk.

I notice you don't use the same rhetorical device here. You don't say "The wife killed her husband by calling police". Instead, you lay out an attempt to understand her mindset. But you don't accord the police the same respect.

It's not his house, and the police were *asked* to investigate. They seem to have been aware of his background, and the fact that he was behaving in a way his own family thought was dangerous. That gives them both the authority to detain him, and the obligation to act to protect others. It's not as simple as you present it.

So I'll borrow your approach. Are you arguing that when I want the police to leave my yard, I should approach them with a firearm and fire it into the air and ground, then point it at them? Is that normal behavior that the police should simply ignore?

Worse, I don't think there was even a warrant. The guy wasn't suspected of any crime. The police fired in tear gas when he had not threatened anyone, he simply refused to leave his house.

He has the right to do that.