PUBLIC NOTICE
New Tip Jar HOS Policy
To: The Daily Kos Diarists
From: A Service-Connected Veteran with PTSD
Subject: The Careless Use of Psychiatric Diagnosis in Service of an Anti-Gun Agenda
Whatever the merits or demerits of your desire to see a lessening of gun violence in America, and I wholeheartedly join you in that wish, you are hereby put on notice that armchair diagnosis of PTSD from the comfort of your keyboard will result in automatic Hide Rating of your Tip Jar by this writer.
Employment of the "crazy veteran with a gun" meme is out of bounds. Write, if you must, of right handed people with a gun, or tall people with a gun, or brunette people with a gun, or any other meaningless and overbroad stereotype you wish. I'll let the tall righty brunettes defend themselves.
I'm all of that too, tall, righty, brunette, but you don't paint me with too broad a brush for those things. It's time you stopped smearing me, and my brothers and sisters with your stunning ignorance of what PTSD is and isn't, how veterans with PTSD do and don't behave.
Too many of you have, in your eagerness to see an end to senseless tragedies like the slaughter of Newtown, or Aurora, or Tucson, to name just a few of too many episodes, latched on to tragedies like the recent killing of a former sniper as an occasion to demonstrate exactly how little you know about PTSD beyond that you think it is the label to apply to something you don't have a clue about. Nor has it even been established that Eddie Ray Routh has been diagnosed with PTSD by a medical practicioner.
How many of you understand, for example, that Miltary Sexual Trauma is a form of PTSD? Do you mean to imply that victims of rape or sexual abuse are crazed killers with guns? What about civilian rape victims?
I can't make you not sprawl your ignorance all over the internet, but, unless the banhammer stops me I've got five HRs a day. Please let me end every day with the same five.