i thought i misread this

but i re-read the figure and i didn't. the new york times found 121 instances where combat veterans of afghanistan and iraq were charged with OR proven to have committed a killing (back home). that figure, to me, is ASTOUNDING. and remember, this is ONLY WHAT THEY FOUND. who the hell really knows what the real figures are. who the hell really knows how many are suicidal OR WILL commit some sort of major crime in the future. we MUST do something and do it NOW. our veterans NEED HELP. their families need help. where is the public outcry? why is congress investigating steroid use in mlb? why the fuck aren't they doing something out THIS instead?

War Torn
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles
By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army. This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”
Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it. ........

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.