I don't applaud Hamas, I think their actions are as deplorable.

But I understand them.

Similarly, I understand the French Resistance. Or the American "terrorists" (Son's of Liberty) that started the resistance against the British which eventually led to the War of Independence... Of course, those are terrorists that we agree with because they were on the side of good. So we call them a resistance or patriots. The people they killed were obviously all evil ne'er-do-wells who deserved it, innocents were never harmed... /eyeroll

I had a good laugh at the "50% of the kids have PTSD". Oh the poor dears, perhaps their government shouldn't have zoned their houses in a fucking warzone. At least they have bomb shelters, a warning system, Iron Dome ffs...

But you'll have to remind me, where are the bomb shelters in Gaza when Israeli artillery and guided munitions come a knocking? Where's the automated missile defense system shooting down incoming strikes, or the warning system to tell people an attack is imminent? Who's supplying them with first class military equipment?

Have you ever seen one of Hamas' vaunted "rockets"? A home built, hand machined dumbfire which uses ammonium nitrate and sugar as it's propellant, and mostly low grade explosives as it's payload. No guidance, just launch and hope it hits something. Yup, it'll kill you if it lands on you, but they are weapons of desperation, not a serious threat. The 600 to 30 kill ratio at the moment speaks to that.

I'm getting PTSD from every fucking project I've worked on because my manager can't understand that massive scope shifts = teh bad...

Pretty sure this is on here.

http://videosift.com/video/PTSD-incident

PTSD does not mean what you think it means.

First of all, you're confusing remorse/regret with post-traumatic stress disorder. They're not the same thing.
Secondly, military soldiers aren't the only ones that experience PTSD.
And third, you seem to have a misunderstanding of what constitutes "trauma," and ways to treat it.

From one of the news links:

"PTSD is never a defense or an excuse," said [Psychologist Dr. Michael] Mantell. "It may be an explanation."

He has PTSD, and that causes him major issues. However, this is merely an explanation and not a defense or an excuse because he's still not completely a puppet to his disorder. I've known people who have fought and have PTSD, and they do not do things like this. The wounded woman filming this incident likely has PTSD, and she certainly didn't respond ballistically.

@bareboards2 Stop feeling so bad. He is not completely without control of himself or the situation. Assholes can have PTSD too.

This happened in April 2013. Here is an interview with the driver, after the fact:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNwTzaKd44U


In September, the military issued new guidelines to help control road rage. The "rules" sound completely insipid -- until you realize that they leave out an important phrase -- do you suffer from PTSD from your time in a military zone? Then, to me, these guidelines are calming and non-blaming.

http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130902/NEWS/309020008/Marine-Corps-takes-road-rage-after-outburst-caught-video

Putting it in a shoebox is exactly how you get PTSD. Bad idea.

My que was full when I had a chance to sift it, and I forgot about it once my que had room agian. Glad to see it got Sifted. I think it was the story about his father and realizing his father had PTSD that made it worth it.

This may run long, so bear with me.

Law Enforcement employees tend to come from two specific groups of people. The first group is going to consist of people who actually joined up to try to protect people and make things safer for them. They are idealists who may grow jaded over time; because realistically if your only input on what being a LEO is the internet and reality TV, you are not prepared for the type of mental assault you will endure day in and day out. I'm not talking about angry people, but stuff like drawing circles around little chunks of brains on the highway from a teenage girl that went through a windshield.

As an officer at any level (except maybe a small town), you are going to see the absolute worst side of humanity on a daily basis and you aren't on a tour of duty like the military. You don't get to 'rotate' home and put it behind you. This will wear on anybody who is not a sociopath, it will grind you down to a nub. You could see professional help for this, but I will go into that later.

The second type of person who goes into law enforcement is someone who likes authority, a sense of power over someone else, a bully. This person is in the job because it gives them power over others and the law will protect them because it is vaguely worded in SO many cases. This person will shrug off the effects that cripple the first type over time, because they feel in charge of every situation. After a while, if they don't tone it down, they will get caught. Thankfully the cell camera and the internet tends to be helping clean them out due to their own incapability to see they can't ALWAYS be in charge, but it will be a long road because this group is the BULK of the ones that join LE organizations.

Now why do these two groups tend to be the ones that you are going to run into on a consistent basis? The simple, hard answer is that we pay our front line LEO's very little compared to other services that risk their life or experience the mental grind. Your average patrol officer is going to pull a median salary of about 35k with comparable benefits to someone working in a office job. A firefighter is going to pull around 45k and scales up much quicker, not to mention their benefits are beyond good. EMT's make about the same as patrol officers, but their benefits are also very good and they don't have the same stressors. I know that ranges will vary and State LEO's are very well paid on average, but we are talking about the people you are going to encounter most often.

If you have to choose between a job where you are going to be considered a 'hero' or a job where everyone is going to be biased towards you being a 'villain, and the hero jobs pay better, which would you logically choose? Assuming of course that you are not sorted into one of the two groups I described, most are going to run away from serving in LE. In fact, this is why more of the 'bullies' tend towards LE and the 'idealists' don't. So you already have created a situation where the 'stormtrooper' mindset is going to prefer this job and haven't considered options to rectify it. The people you don't run into that much are going to be the people that took college and got pushed through the ranks quickly. If you didn't take college or just took an Associates Degree, you have to beat these people out. It is extremely hard to do that, even if you do your job much better than they did.

The final factor that runs into this is the mental issues I mentioned earlier. If you seek help from your employers for mental stress, they are going to handle it differently if you are a LEO. You are going to find out quickly that you are expendable. If you seek help and get classified as PTSD, you set a chain of events in motion that is inexorable. You will be rotated to a desk. You will see a Psychiatrist who will prescribe anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. This person will meet with you for around 15 minutes 3-4 times a week, ask you questions, and ask if the medication is helping. If you return to functional status in a month or two, you get put back on duty. If you don't, they put you on short term disability for up to one year. Your visits drop to once a week, then once a month. One year later, your employment is terminated. They hire a new recruit and start the cycle again about the same time that you start your short term disability. You get to try to salvage your career in anyway possible, hopefully you paid through the nose for long term disability, or you can try to find a smaller department that doesn't bother to dig too deep on background checks.

Other related fields like firefighters/emts comprehend PTSD and work with their people much harder. They have better benefits so you they can see outside therapists as much as needed. There is less stigma if you have a problem, because they understand. You go on the fritz as an LEO and you will overhear people who used to respect you call you weak or a pussy. Sadly this type of thing happens at all levels of LE, even as a State Trooper you are expendable.

In any case, the point to this essay is that the system is flawed and is going to drive out the good LEOs and save the bad ones to protect itself from litigation. Protect yourself at all times with video, be advised of the laws and loopholes in them that bad LEos will exploit, and don't force confrontation with a LEO if there is a loophole. If the man had stepped outside and talked calmly, the incident would not have escalated as it did. In this case he did not inform himself of the loopholes correctly and got tasered (which was improper, they didn't warn him correctly or anything), and the LEOs look like villains again.

I think PTSD is a psychological condition which is classified as an anxiety disorder (according to Wikipedia at least), actual physical damage to the nervous system would be something else entirely. So maybe Carlin was misinformed or the definition had changed since that bit was written, which was quite a while ago I think.

yeah ptsd is a very broad term and covers more than shell shock. but it certainly downplays the severity and problems associated with a large or repeated concussions to the central nervous system.

Low information voters eh? Maybe they would be better informed if news outlets actually started trying to report the truth and facts, rather than just acting as spin doctors for the party of their choice. I really like George Carlin, but I did take issue with his bit on shell shock vs. PTSD, I suspect that as time went by mental health professionals started seeing people who exhibited the same symptoms as someone with "shell shock" but had never been to war, so they ended up with a more clinical sounding and event neutral name.

Would the absence of guns have prevented this murder? Maybe, maybe not. The killer could have used a knife, a hammer, a lead pipe, a screw driver, a frying pan or any other potentially lethal object instead. Granted, it would have been harder, but considering that the majority of violent crimes are committed with melee weapons, it's not improbable.

The issue here is what lead to the killing and how such incidents can be avoided in the future. Banning guns isn't going to suddenly rid the world of paranoia, racism, PTSD, senility, irresponsibility, psychosis, poverty, desperation, ignorance or any of the multitude of human conditions. People who want to hurt other people will always do so unless you address the root of that desire.

As an aside, there is a practical reason for civilians to own guns. Although the gun was misused in this particular case, criminals do exist and there are many who like to rob/mug/rape/murder innocent people. If there weren't, we wouldn't need laws. All weapons, especially guns, are equalizers. They allow physically inferior people to defend themselves against physically superior people who want to abuse their superiority. They allow a single person to defend themselves against multiple assailants. Melee weapons can do the same but are far less effective due their dependence on physical prowess. To claim that guns serve no purpose is short-sighted and ignores these facts.

'Cept for this guy, who it looks like was a PTSD Vietnam oldster, I blame a combination of a collective societal developmental disability combined with poor diet/lack of good drugs, too much goddamn television, electronics and obsession with and necessity of the same , working to pay without play and not enough fucking. Plus everything to be heard in media/internet, is either a half-truth, meaningless, or a downright lie.
I blame the death of the spoken word for the sake of the word. I blame you.