Four Marines killed in a rampage shooting, coincidentally occurring a few weeks after another one

I know service members who agree with it. They signed on to stand between the citizens and the predators. They are, for the most part, sheepdogs by nature, not wolves, not sheep. Given the choice between the shooter going after Marines or walking into a shopping mall and shooting up soccer moms, or getting on a municipal bus and killing those aboard, they say "bring it on."

They'd much rather that they had guns too, of course.

There's a lot in that article I agree with. I know it's not popular to say so, but at least this guy did actually go after military related targets, not just random women and children for extra terror value. It is also true that we routinely target recruiters and training bases as legitimate military targets. We just blow them up with drones, and as often as not we kill unrelated people unlucky enough to be nearby at the wrong time. Bombs don't discriminate.

The U.S. has been in many wars but it has been a long time since the horrors of war have been visited on this country. War is something we watch on television, "Shock and Awe" on CNN, live and in color. There has not been substantial destruction and bloodshed here since 1865. There was some shelling, ships sunk off the coast in WW I and II, but there's been more destruction in Syria in the last month than this country has suffered in war in the last hundred and fifty years. We need to suck it up and understand that this sort of thing is going to happen. It is almost impossible to prevent such a strike if the person committing it is willing to die in doing it, whether he wears a suicide vest into a movie theater or he climbs a hill with line of sight to a football stadium's seats with a couple of rifles and a dozen magazines.

 

Are you separating 9/11 from "war" and "substantial destruction and bloodshed since 1865"?

 

I just think you can't overgeneralize to making something 100% absolute. You said NO hunter and NO manly man would get help. I would agree that a law like that would put a dent in folks seeking help, but I don't think it would reduce it to an absolute zero.

 

Is there some large percentage of "hunters" or other kinds of "manly" men currently seeking help for depression or other mental disorders?

The folks we are talking about have mostly had their first experience with mental health experts in their early teens, and were taken there by their concerned parents.

I don't think any law like I'm suggesting would stop parents from seeking help for their kids.

 

This case does sort of make you wonder how the guy earned his engineering degree.

I always thought that was a tough course of study? How did this guy get through it?

 

I see what he's saying ... it's relative. As bad as 9/11 was, it was a pretty small event compared to some things other countries have gone through. For example, you'd have had to have a 9/11 every 10 hours for four years to match just the number of Soviet soldiers -- not the civilians -- killed on the eastern front in WWII.

 

The end of that sentence was "... Than our schools or buses."

His argument is that it isn't terrorism, but an act of war. We're participating in drone strikes and bombings of camps, so they consider an attack on soldiers at recruiting centers to be retaliation.

 

There is, I'm quite certain, some large percentage of former service members seeking help for PTSD, as well as other disorders, I would think.

 

Legitimate objection, and a terrible oversight on my part. I regret the error. Of course 9/11 counts.

On the other hand, while I don't know what the recent body count looks like in Syria, I'm certain that there have been months which exceeded our 9/11 deaths. 9/11 is the exception that proves the rule. Regardless of what a traumatic and horrific event it was, the death toll was about 3,000. In terms of war, that's more than a skirmish, perhaps a small battle. We reacted as though it were an enormous death toll, mostly because our sense of security and invulnerability was violated.

Roughly 200,000 people have been killed in Syria over the last four years, and I don't know that most Americans even consider that a "war". It's an insurgency, or a rebellion, or whatever, but I doubt that most people you ask would refer to it as a war. That term is normally reserved for broader conflicts.

Someone killed in an insurgency smells just as bad after five days in the sun.

 

I don't have any great insight into the Chattanooga shooter's mindset, but he shot up the recruiting station, then drove several miles to the other post where he made his kills. He seems to have made a deliberate effort to target actual soldiers, people who at least directly represented those fighting in the Middle East. He seems to have had that motivation in his head. Certainly he could have easily walked into the nearest McDonalds and shot anyone he saw instead. This does not constitute bravery, but it is more of a strike back at those involved than a random terror attack on whoever he saw as vulnerable to one.

 

Study shows 70 percent of Americans take prescription drugs - CBS News

The second most common prescription drug type is anti-depressants, with roughly 13% of the population taking them. I strongly suspect that several of them might be hunters or gun owners.

 

We're getting closer to a motive, and to me being right on multiple levels:

Counterterrorism investigators have uncovered evidence the gunman who killed five service members last week in Chattanooga, Tenn., searched the Internet in the days leading up to the attack for Islamic materials about whether martyrdom would lead to forgiveness for his sins, like drunkenness and financial debt, according to law enforcement officials.

The searches are one part of a nuanced portrait of the 24-year-old gunman, Mohammod Abdulazeez, that investigators have patched together based on examinations of his electronic and online communications and interviews with his family and friends. The F.B.I., which is leading the investigation, has become increasingly convinced that Mr. Abdulazeez, who died in a shootout with police, turned to radical ideology as he struggled with severe mental health and financial issues, the officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/us/chattanooga-gunman-mohammod-abdulazeez.html