Gun therapy hits unexpected snag

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Chris Kyle] returned home to become a best-selling author and a mentor to other veterans, sometimes taking them shooting at a gun range near his Texas home as a kind of therapy to salve battlefield scars, friends said. One such veteran was Eddie Ray Routh, a 25-year-old Marine who had served tours in Iraq and Haiti.

But on Saturday, far from a war zone, Mr. Routh turned on Mr. Kyle, 38, and a second man, Chad Littlefield, 35, shortly after they arrived at an exclusive shooting range near Glen Rose, Tex., about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, law enforcement authorities said Sunday. The officials said that for reasons that were still unclear, Mr. Routh shot and killed both men with a semiautomatic handgun before fleeing in a pickup truck belonging to Mr. Kyle.

Comments

[snippy]

Given what we know about associating behavior with triggers, why would anyone ever think that associating shooting (or other intentional violence) with PTSD is a good idea? Target practice is for when you're calm and happy, not as therapy for strong negative emotions.

[james_davis_nicoll]

My guess is for Kyle it wasn't a trigger and he may not have realized it was for others. Or perhaps he thought by confronting triggers they could be overcome.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

Obviously the therapy didn't work because they didn't use enough guns. More guns would have done the job.

[emt-hawk.livejournal.com]

I dunno. There were other armed shooters there, and nobody popped off a round at this guy, apparently.

--Hawk

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

The problem is, they were experienced shooters who knew to hide when the bullets started flying in the wrong places. If they had been inexperienced school teachers or principals, I'm sure they would have fired at him.

I'm boggled. We license drivers and accidents still occur at the training locations, and cars are only incidentally deadly. Even if something like gun therapy works eighty per cent of the time (and that's arguable), you're still going to run into the other twenty per cent, with usually tragic results.

My condolences to the families of Mr. Kyle and Mr. Littlefield.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I've got little sympathy for gun proponents, but I do like fairness and accuracy.

"So there wasn't anybody anywhere close to that," [Upshaw] said, explaining there are no known witnesses

All the headlines are saying "gun range" but that's misleading. It wasn't a case of a lot of by-standers present with guns. Apparently the two victims and killer were the only people there at the time.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/03/justice/texas-sniper-killed/index.html

The Rough Creek Lodge is a large facility that draws couples getting married, business people using its conference center and families looking for a getaway. Hunting and shooting sports are some of the many recreational options available on its grounds.
Kyle, Littlefield and Routh were three such visitors, arriving together around 3:15 p.m. (4:15 p.m. ET) Saturday and proceeding to a shooting range within the resort's 11,000 acres, Bryant told reporters Sunday. The range is in a "very remote part" of the sprawling complex, Upshaw explained.

"So there wasn't anybody anywhere close to that," he said, explaining there are no known witnesses

[kuangning]

Completely, utterly unexpected. Who could possibly have foretold that putting semi-automatic weapons in the hands of psychologically disturbed people could lead to such tragedy?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I know I'm shocked, just like I was shocked by that modal Analog reader in Alabama shooting a bus driver to kidnap an autistic kid for his Farnham's Freehold fantasies. So very shocked.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Considering everything Alabama's been up to lately it's hard not to think that an insanity virus has hit the state, perhaps imported from AZ, via Texas? Or maybe from South Carolina, which has always been bat$hyte nuts since its aristo founders invested in the company in expectation that it would a colony made up entirely of aristocratic owners on the British feudal era model, complete with the bound serfs, i.e. slaves. And nothing in the middle.

Love, C.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

You mean an armed society isn't a polite society? I'm shocked, shocked to see that this might not be the case. Perhaps the arms were defective in some way.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Well, clearly Kyle and Littlefield weren't polite _enough_. The establishment of a polite society can't be done without breaking a few eggs, and some people will be a bit slow to learn the importance of keeping their mouth shut and nodding at everything the ranty guy with the gun says.

Bruce

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

And sadly, with the gun-grabbing frenzy gripping the nation, arms makers don't have the confidence to invest in technologies that could eliminate such defects. A higher cyclic rate of fire, faster clip-lock, and better muzzle-flash suppression would usher in a golden age of politeness.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

People elsewhere on the flist have reported that physical activity requiring high dexterity and mental focus helped them cope with PTSD (horse riding, martial arts) so it's not an obviously stupid decision. It would probably be ill-advised if there were existing signs of violent impulses, but that can be very hard to anticipate.

(I get a sense here of LOLing about tragic deaths, and assumptions that mentally ill people must be violent, that don't become sympathetic just because the victims may or may not have been right-wing)

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

The idea that guns are a way to help cope with PTSD is profoundly misplaced, as the military itself knows: Two retired Army generals, Peter W. Chiarelli and Dennis J. Reimer, have spoken out about the urgency of reversing the trend. "One of the things we learned during our careers," they wrote in The Washington Post last month, "is that stress, guns and alcohol constitute a dangerous mixture. In the wrong proportions, they tend to blow out the lamp of the mind and cause irrational acts." More here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/14/military-suicides-2012_n_2472895.html

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Really, anyone who has skimmed the Darwin Awards knows about the combination of guns and alcohol...

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Pissed off, not laughing. The small penis contingent would reach for their Steely Dans if they saw my expression. That's okay: they're fucking losers.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Saying these people are "Analog readers" with "small penis[es]" certainly comes across as LOLing at tragedy.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

physical activity requiring high dexterity and mental focus helped them cope with PTSD

Yes, that's why my grandfather liked woodworking. But that doesn't make gunplay an obvious parallel. Similarly, overcoming small challenges helps people deal with depression, but that doesn't mean setting them large challenges they'll probably fail at is an even better idea.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Target shooting really is good for a lot of kinds of regular old daily stress; it's fundamentally a relaxation contest with a point scoring system.

Combat veterans with PTSD, though, yikes. I can see exactly why it helped Chris Kyle and exactly why generalizing was a bad idea.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

and assumptions that mentally ill people must be violent

Well yes, that's one of the many elephants that's crowding out rational debate about gun control in the US – the pro-gunners don't address the issue that people with a great many mental illnesses aren't intrinsically violent because they can use that at the state level to stop gun registration systems being implemented, and anyway there isn't enough of a mental healthcare system in the US for it to be a hindrance to most people getting guns, and so doesn't cut into the profits of gun manufacturer and arms dealer lobbyist groups who run the pro-gunner side of things.

Meanwhile on the no-guns side you have people waving around the largely fictional threat of a swarm of M-16 weilding malkfishes* as justification for banning assault rifles while they fail to even attempt the sort of blanket ban of handguns that would actually dent the gun crime rate.

It's like watching a much slower version of that rich twit olympics sketch from monty python.

* "Malkfishes" were the "bad" players of Vampire: The Masquerade, a 90s pen&paper RPG for goths which almost was well made, cuz you had the obvious ann rice romantic artiste vampires, and the snooty aristocratic vampires, and the punk vampires and the animalistic shapeshifting vampires... but it also had some bad ideas, like the kleptomaniac gypsy vampires (no, really), and the "crazy" vampires.

The crazy vampires were known as malkavians, and their worst players tended to play their "madness" as wacky randomness, which for some reason almost always involved fish in some fashion, either the characters were always carrying a fish, or they would shout "fish!" at random moments in dialogue or some how fish would occur.

Nobody liked those players.

But basically that seems to be who the gun control crowd in america fears having guns more than anyone.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

blanket ban of handguns that would actually dent the gun crime rate

I think we would need to look more carefully at that 'gun crime rate'. What if you broke it down to criminals vs criminals, professional robbers, pre-mediated crimes with rational motives -- then looked just at the sort of shootings that really are impulse or, if premeditated, crazy massacres such as the Newtown or Batman incidents.

Professional criminals can evade any ban (in the US). A rational person planning murder of a particular individual would do better making it look like an accident anyway.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

If it is combat-induced PTSD, then it does seem to be an obviously stupid decision. There isn't really a similarity between the physicality of actual physical activity of horse riding and martial arts, and standing there with a gun shooting at targets.

I didn't read James' NY Times link (limiting my hits on the site so I don't "run out" of free articles) but the CBS article reports Routh threatened to kill himself and his family over Labor Day weekend and was hospitalized, and again hospitalized just three weeks ago.

When I transcribed reports for a VA hospital, I did a lot of psych clinic reports, and the counselors and doctors always recommended PTSD patients store their firearms away from the home, if not completely get rid of them.

So I feel pretty confident that Kyle's and Littlefield's decisions to continue with "gun therapy" for this troubled man was "obviously stupid," and probably contributes to the LOLing, because people see this as a case of a gun nut believing the completely wrong things just so he can justify guns.

[ravenskyewalker.livejournal.com]

I'm not LOLing; I regret what happened to Kyle and Littlefield, and am not too happy about the mess that Routh now is. However, some unruly part of me wants to snarl at the NRA, "So, what about your party line about the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun being a good guy with a gun? Why didn't that work here, when we had two good guys with guns?"

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

I am a bit skeptical of the answer to psychological disorders caused by traumatic events being to repeat elements of those events with the addition of alcohol and ready access to firearms.

- Krin

[kaffy_r]

I am profoundly pro-gun control and anti-broad public use of guns. I grew up in Canada and moved to the States, a process that has only made my stance stronger.

But all I can think in this case is of the tragedy of two lives lost, one of them a man who was trying to help another profoundly troubled man, the other someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All of them carried and used guns. All of them believed in guns. I could, if two of them were still alive, debate with them over whether their belief in and use of guns in any situation was correct in general or for this specific case and/or occasion.

I can't do that now. Two of them are dead. I will mourn them. I will fight the NRA via petition and money when I can. But I will not - as angry as I am - do more, while talking about this specific occasion, than mourn the fact that two men are dead, and the one who killed them is forever wounded.