Fighting noise with noise

I don't get this Newsweek story - I think it's indicative of how much is terribly wrong with the American media, because there's no news here. Local news, sure. But news worth being in a national news mag? No.

There's a Marine, and he was pretty good at his job, which consisted of collecting and packaging up body parts of the victims of the war in Iraq. He gets home from Iraq, and seems edgy and not quite the way he was before. One night he gets pissed off at some noisy partiers across the street, opens his window, grabs his shotgun, and shoots at them.

Er, okay. Now, I don't condone anything he did, be it the 'joining the Marines' thing, or the 'let's shoot out my window at the people who are noisy.' But this is news how?

PTSD is not a new phenomenon - it's been around as long as war has, admittedly under different names. I won't say that that wasn't a factor in what he did. But seriously: he's a former Marine from Lawrence, Ma., which Newsweek describes as "a struggling old mill town." To me, that does not say that the people of Lawrence are sophisticated, level-headed, educated urbanites. It says to me that, when a Latino club opened up, the main complaint may not really have been the noise, but the people who frequented it. It makes me think that, maybe, the people of Lawrence think that being a Marine or a mortician is the best you can ask for, because, hey - it puts food on the table, keeps you in bullets for you guns, and serves God 'n' Country - what more is there?

So, a small-town Marine gets pissed off at his neighbors, pulls out his shotgun, and tries to scare them away.

Tell me this has never happened before. Go ahead and tell me that a gung-ho soldier has never before tried to solve a problem by shooting someone, and, while your at it, just go ahead and continue pretending that America's not encouraging this. "Join the Army, kids! Join the Air Force! Here, have a gun, have some bullets - no armor, though, sorry - and go fight!" Then, next thing you know, it's: "Okay, great, you're done. Good job serving your selfish and materialistic nation - don't ever do anything like this again."

America is populated, governed, and policed largely by morons.