Rachel Maddow has some major beef with the media over its reporting of the Fort Hood shooting.
Soldier Ivan Lopez opened fire at the Fort Hood military base in Texas on Wednesday and killed four people, including himself. Many of the headlines and articles about the shooting have focused on the fact that Lopez was an Iraq War veteran undergoing mental health treatment, something that Maddow said was a major disservice to veterans.
Maddow said Thursday that the coverage seemed to suggest "that the most important deciding factor on what explains the [shooting] must be the fact that the suspected perpetrator is an Iraq War veteran. As if veterans are uniquely dangerous. As if knowing the suspected shooter served in Iraq explains why this happened."
The focus on Lopez's military service, Maddow alleged, perpetuates stereotypes that soldiers are "broken" and "monstrous." She went on to say:
"If we think of every other mass shooting in America as somehow particular to the circumstances of that shooting but this one as explained away as 'Oh he was an Iraq vet'... not only does that not help us understand what happened here, it is an offense against every other veteran who right now is getting that stigma shoveled onto them by a lazy civilian world and a lazy civilian media who find this dangerous veteran stereotype to be an easier thing to point to than America has a bad mass shooting problem."
Watch her full comments in the clip above.
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