No Half-Staff Flag At White House For Dead Chattanooga Servicemen: Citizens Want Answers

Flying flags at half-staff has long been a symbol of mourning over the deaths of principal figures of the United States government as well as others. It’s a collective way for both state and federal governments to show respect for a deceased person’s memory.

And many are now upset that it hasn’t been done for the five servicemen killed in the Chattanooga shooting of July 16, 2015.
Four Marines were killed on the day of and one U.S. Navy petty officer died a few days after from wounds suffered at the hands of Middle Eastern gunman Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.
(Abdulazeez was killed by police the day of the shooting.)
Four days later, and the White House has made no indication that it plans to fly flags at half-staff, even though it made the decision to “following the shootings at Fort Hood, the Aurora Century Theater, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook,” Snopes reports.
Furthermore, Fox News has confirmed that many Chattanooga residents are wondering why President Obama hasn’t made such a call, particularly since he had in the Fort Hood slayings of 2009.
According to Snopes, the Chattanooga deaths “involved members of the U.S. armed forces who are considered to have been killed in the line of duty” while most of the other cases involved citizen deaths. For President Obama to do so at a national level “would require the President to pick and choose among service deaths to decide which to so honor.”
Then why Fort Hood? It depends on whom you ask.
Snopes theorizes that flying the flag at half-staff in the Fort Hood case happened because “the shooter was himself a member of the U.S. Army, and the attack was classified as an act of workplace violence” rather than line-of-duty.
Opponents of the administration see it a different way, accusing the President of being a newly elected opportunist in 2009 but a second-term President, who no longer “has to pretend” and can “show his true colors” six and a half years into his presidency if you buy in to the Fox News commenter theories.

 Chattanooga asking why white house flags aren't at half mast

 

Tennessee (the site of the attack); Massachusetts (home to one of the dead Marines); and Arkansas (home to a second of the dead Marines), have decided to fly flags at half-staff, but those decisions were made at the state level.