Guns for PTSD Treatment

On February 2, 2013, retired Navy SEAL Chris Kyle brought out retired Marine Reservist Eddie Routh to go shoot some firearms. Hours later, Routh shot and killed Kyle and his friend. Kyle had been taking out veterans out to the shooting range to help them cope with PTSD. The story is from NPR.

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What Kyle tried to do for veterans was a form of cognitive therapy using exposure to help with their PTSD. For example, a therapist might force a patient to touch a snake if the person has a fear of snakes or hold a  bug if the person has a fear for bugs. Todd Vance is an Iraqi war veteran fighting in Mixed Martial Arts and the reasoning for him is so that he can remember a situation and not remember the trauma.

At first it might not seem a good idea to remember a traumatic event. But the veterans coming back with horrid memories of war are a different story. Maybe it helps them find closure, like how the military will do everything in their power to get a body of a deceased military member back home. It’s better to know what happened instead of not knowing because there are a lot of possibilities.

Vance says “‘Everybody deals with it differently’”. It’s because no case of PTSD is similar. What Kyle tried to do is considered dangerous without the supervision of a doctor. Someone with PTSD can have flashbacks to a memory that causes them to snap. It could be simple as a the smell of gunpowder, a barking dog, and of course gunfire.


FUTURE RESEARCH: What's the Pentagon's solution for this? What can they do for the veterans that sacrificed so much only to come back home with their country abandoning them?