Robert David Melton; another police officer/veteran passes

Bobo sends a link to the news that Kansas City, Kansas police captain and National Guardsman Robert David Melton was murdered last night by an unidentified assailant while on duty;

Melton served from 2007 to 2010 in the Kansas Army National Guard, where he trained soldiers who sought to be commissioned as officers with the National Guard. Subsequently, he served in Afghanistan as an operations officer for a tank squadron, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Jason Kander, who served in the army before eventually becoming Missouri secretary of state, said he met Melton in the military.

“I had the privilege of working very briefly but closely with Capt. Melton a few years ago when we were both Army Officer Candidate School Platoon Trainers assigned to the same annual training,” Kander said in an e-mail statement to The Star.

Many times the media fails to notice that, even when murderers are veterans, many times their victims, the police are veterans, too. The murderers in Dallas and Baton Rouge both killed veterans. The Associated Press notices;

Seeing one Marine kill another Marine after both had returned home safely from the battlefield in Iraq has been especially painful for the military’s smallest branch, which considers service life-long membership among a force that goes by the motto: “The Few. The Proud.”

“In the Marine community, we don’t believe in ‘ex-Marines’. However that is not the case when one decides to break the moral and ethical values we hold dear. The ex-Marine that opened fire on officers is everything we swear to protect our Nation from,” Marine Cpl. Eric Trichel wrote on a Facebook page with about 25,000 mostly Marine members.

In an email to The Associated Press, he emphasized he was not speaking on behalf of the Marine Corps.

Many veterans fear the service records of the gunmen will feed a false perception that combat veterans are volatile and violent, turning back years of efforts to change such stereotypes.

We’d also remind folks that millions of veterans have not killed anyone since we took off our uniforms. We don’t understand how those guys could murder people in cold blood. If we knew why, you can bet we’d put an end to it all, especially since it’s our own brother veterans who are the targets, too.

Category: Veterans Issues