Hey folks,

Entirely “real world” post for this one. If you’re here for the stunts, stage combat & action movie stuff, just scroll on past.

…those of you that remained, carry on.

The last couple of months have been an online shitstorm for the U.S. military on multiple fronts.

(not in chronological order)

One mensa candidate (a Staff NCO, no less) decided to wax poetic about Trayvon Martin while on the rifle range. Unspecified punishment.

Then some Army dipshit loses a comrade to an IED blast and takes it upon herself to tell said comrade’s wife that she’s now a widow… on Facebook. Unspecified punishment.

And the blogosphere loses its shit over a Scout-sniper team photo featuring an SS flag. Mercifully, cooler heads prevailed as the team’s higher-ups gave a “put that shit away and never bring it out again.”

One would think that with the educational power and scope of the internet, one could figure out that Scout Snipers, posing in front of a flag that said, “SS,” would realize they stood for the phrase “Scout Snipers,” as opposed to the Schutzstaffel. Then again, that may well fucking be vastly overestimating the average cognizance level of your typical internet user.

((Yes, yes I can use six-syllable words and “fuck” in the same sentence, thank you very much.))

Then a soldier in Afghanistan sends photos of his supposed war buddies posing with corpses and pieces of suicide bombers to the L.A. Times. The Times and the brass do the usual monkey dance of “please don’t publish” “we’re gonna publish just because you asked us not to!” And the internet is presented with posed-for-Facebook pictures of soldiers with pieces of their enemies.

And, lest we forget, video of Marines pissing on dead Taliban show up online.

And I’m not even going into the Qur’an burning bullshit, or the Secret Service prostitutes nonsense, or the Marine getting ad-sepped for talking shit about Obama on Facebook while active duty stupidity.

So, now that I’ve aired some dirty laundry of my comrades, where am I getting at?

One word: crackdown.

I guarantee you that U.S. military units around the world have, over the last few months, gotten word of “don’t let this stupid shit come from YOUR people.” Lectures have been given, PowerPoint rangers have wielded their laptops and spouted their bullet points, and yet another check-in-the-box class, probably with some fucking bullshit title like “social media sensitivity awareness” has already garnered a small commendation for it’s pogalicious author. The latest layer of ass-cover was knitted with precision, every stitch and fucking knot covered and aligned.

In a practical sense, this means that the default setting of saying anything of an active duty military nature online will be boiled down to silence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, OPSEC IS IMPORTANT. The potential embarrassment of your higher-ups shouldn’t be, but it winds up being so (to them, at least).

((Aside: yeah, I have friends that are higher-ups. And they know as much as I do that upper ranks make people political creatures. That’s the only way they last long enough to stay higher-ups. Doesn’t make them any more base or noble, just an aspect of their being. Fuck, “aspect of being?” Fucking liberal arts degree is showing again. I’ll cover that up with some rum later.))

So we hear less stories from the battlefield. We already are. It used to be that online stupidity happened already in the field, and was punished according to higher-ups’ discretion. (read “Just Another Soldier” by Jason Christopher Hartley for a good example of being fucked over for embarrassing your c.o.). Nowadays, incidents like the urination and the SS team photo are coming online well after the warriors in question are out of the battlefield (and in some cases, out of the military entirely) and the shitstorm still ensues.

I’m not going to debate the merits of any of these individual cases((one exception: I believe in treating the bodies of enemy dead with dignity and respect. That said, signing up to be a suicide bomber is probably the most blatant statement of “I-don’t-give-two-fucks-what-happens-to-my-body” that’s humanly possible. You may as well bequeath your un-vaporized bits to the FB photo collage of whoever has to clean up what’s left of your sorry ass. End aside.)), but I will say that this road leads to fewer war stories coming out.

And we don’t have many to begin with. I’ve already written in the past about how student veterans are being actively discouraged from discussing their wartime experiences. That’s only going to get worse as shit like this keeps cropping up.

So, what can you, humble citizen, do to alleviate this? Or at least help it not get worse?

#1: Fucking think. Before you comment, post, resend or what have you, think about what’s going on. And more importantly, think about WHY it’s happening.

#2: Do your fucking research. The Scout-sniper example above could’ve been averted if a few people could’ve stopped to realize something instead of screaming “NAZIS!”

#3: Recognize the actions of an individual as such.

Popping smoke,

~Jay

For those who don’t recognize the byline, Tucker Thayer was the most recent victim of a fatal firearm accident involving shooting blanks in a theater or film setting.

There’s a lot of news articles and a court brief involved in this, so let me outline the major players first:

Tucker Thayer: 15 years old. Died of a gunshot wound to the head in the light and sound booth of the Desert Hills High School Theater.

Michael Eaton: Drama teacher at Desert Hills H.S. and director of the production.

Officer Stacey Richan: St. George, Utah police officer, assigned to DHHS as a resource officer.

Robert Goulding: Vice Principal of DHHS

David Amodt: Father of the production’s stage manager.

In the fall of 2008, DHHS was putting on a production of Oaklahoma. Wanting a realistic sound effect, Eaton asked Richan and Goulding for permission to use a gun that fired blanks. All agreed, under the provision that an adult would be the only person to transport, posses, and fire the gun used, that adult supervision would be in place at all times, and that the weapon would be transported in a locked case with no other access other than the adult mentioned above.

(Though there has been some confusion on this point, all three were acting within Utah state law by having a weapon on school property with these rules in place. While I haven’t looked at the laws of the City of St. George or Washington County, Utah law considers firearms possession lawful if “approved by the responsible school administrator” (Goulding, in this case), and “the item is present or to be used in connection with a lawful, approved activity and is in the possession or under the control of the person responsible for its possession or use.” (Utah Code, 76-10-505.5 (4) (b-c). So, while it wasn’t necessary and proved to be ultimately tragic, possession under the rules they established together was legal.)

Amodt volunteered use of his personal .38 revolver. At first, all of the above rules were followed. Then, at some point, he began allowing Tucker to shoot the gun during rehearsals, and Tucker knew the combination to the gun’s lockbox at some point as well.

On November 5, 2008, Amodt could not attend rehearsal, sending his wife with the gun in his place (after gaining Goulding’s permission by phone). Mrs. Amodt put the case in her daughter’s pack, accompanying her to rehearsal. Along the way, they encountered Richan(pg 4-5), who indicated that Eaton knew the rules and all was well.

On November 15, 2008, Amodt and his daughter left her pack (with the gun case inside it) inside the booth. Both left the booth, attending to other tasks. Soon afterwards, Tucker entered the booth and shot himself in the temple with a blank. The expanding gas cloud drove skull fragments into Tucker’s brain, and he died later that night.

In May of 2009, Thayer’s parents filed a lawsuit against Eaton, Richan, Goulding, Amodt, Washington County Schools, and the city of St. George.

In December of 2009, Goulding and Eaton tried to be dismissed from the lawsuit, citing the Utah governmental Immunity Act. The case is currently being looked at by the Utah supreme court.

Amodt and the Thayers settled sometime between 2009 and 2011.

On February 2, 2012, a judge dismissed Richan and the city of St. George from the suit.

The rest of the case is still ongoing.

Something of note here is that Tucker was an accomplished shooter. As a Boy Scout, he held 2 shooting merit badges and was a range instructor the previous summer. But he wasn’t familiar with either pistols or blanks.

But what I do not see is any indication that cast and crew were shown the dangersinvolved in using that weapon as part of the show.

In the end, if nothing else, 2 big things need to be remembered as a result of this tragedy.

#1: Complacency kills.

Those two words were painted just at the edge of “the wire” on every single base when I was fighting overseas, and they applied here. Had the adults involved in this tragedy followed their own rules, and followed them diligently, Tucker would still be alive.

#2: If you’re going to do it, do it right.

One of the things that scares the piss out of me about the theater scene today is the rapid increase in firearm use without a corresponding increase in firearms education. Despite the considerable efforts of some, movements to add firearms education to an actor’s skill set are few and far between. University programs are understandably reluctant, given that we live in an age that’s post-Columbine, post-NIU, post-VA Tech, and so on. The professional world is not much better, with far too many of the U.S.’s major theatrical cities also being some of the most unfriendly to firearm owners in the country. Even if actors in cities like L.A., NYC, D.C., or Chicago are willing to pursue their own education, onerous laws make it expensive and difficult at best and damn near impossible at worst to do so.

Here’s to hoping the future changes for the better.