This killer was a victim, too
Call it a tragic coincidence of timing.
Another one.
Or describe it as a wake-up call.
Another one.
Whatever explanation you choose, the facts won’t go away: Less than a week before Veterans Day, 28-year-old Ian David Long — a Marine vet who was a machine gunner in Afghanistan — walked into a country-music saloon in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and killed 12 people.
After yet another mass murder involving firearms, there will be a predictable call for stricter gun control in the United States.
But that’s not what’s concerning me today.
Along with the victims and their families, I am hurting for Ian David Long — not to mention his own friends and family members.
Hardly anyone will feel sorry for the killer, but ...
This young man almost certainly was a walking case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and finally …
Finally …
THE WORLD is waking up to the notion that you can’t send young men and women into combat — or any other life-threatening situation — and not expect some of them to emerge with mental and emotional problems.
Sometimes this stress explodes, and we see on the news that another shooter has killed a group of innocent people.
One after another, Long’s friends said he wasn’t the type of person to commit mass murder — that he’d danced joyfully at the same bar, that he had a great sense of humor, that the whole thing was just, so …
Out of character.
Perhaps, but there is an entirely different part to this story.
Thomas Burke, a pastor who served with Long’s regiment in Afghanistan, explained it this way: “We train a generation to be as violent as possible, then we expect them to come home and be OK.
“It’s not mental illness. It’s that we’re doing something to a generation, and we’re not responding to the needs they have.”
There are almost 21 million veterans in America, about 20 percent of whom have seen some form of combat.
“At some places the (Veterans Administration) tries to understand how it affected your life and help you get by,” said Stan Spain, a local disabled vet who was wounded in Vietnam.
“But there are other VA hospitals and clinics where they don’t have staff, or they don’t get it, and you might as well walk right back to the street.”
SPEAKING OF the street, there were more homeless veterans in 2017 (about 40,000) than at any time in the previous seven years.
There are other grim statistics: Female vets are more likely to be victims of suicide than their civilian counterparts of the same age and education.
And so on.
Perhaps because of awful events like the one in Thousand Oaks, the American public at last may be coming to grips with PTSD — and the need to confront it.
In a survey done by the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of respondents said that if they had control of the budget, the VA would be their No. 1 spending priority.
On the night of a homeless census in January 2017, 40,056 veterans were unsheltered.
LATER IN that same year, however, the Trump administration sought to cut funding for a program designed to aid homeless vets.
On Dec. 1, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin told advocates he was gutting a $460 million program dedicated to veteran homelessness.
But after outcry from vet campaigners and members of Congress, Shulkin reversed course, promising “absolutely no change in the funding to support our homeless programs.”
In other words, yes, there are people dedicated to reaching vets like Ian David Long before the gunfire and the IEDS in their heads explode into violence they never would have considered in a normal life.
There is some good news near home, as well.
“The VA office in Coeur d’Alene is much, much better and efficient than it used to be,” Spain said. “It’s a place where you can get help.”
Meanwhile, the push goes on to build a 56-bed facility for vets in Post Falls.
Bravo.
Spain still sees combat in his mind.
He understands it may never go away.
“But if there are people who care, who have an idea what you’ve been through and the everyday problems you face at home,” he said, “you feel like maybe what you went through had some meaning.”
My thanks to friend Don Bradway for sharing a quote that perhaps sums up the entire dilemma of caring for vets in America.
The words came from George Washington...
“The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified,” Washington said, “shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.”
It is a debt we can never completely pay.
But we’re obligated to try.
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Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press and a veteran of the United States Air Force.
A Brand New Day appears from Wednesday through Saturday each week.
Steve’s sports column runs on Tuesday.
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