“But Dr. Edna Foa, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, says that what Chris Kyle was doing with Eddie Ray Routh was not only not prolonged exposure therapy, it wasn’t any kind of therapy at all. Dr. Foa should know; she invented prolonged exposure therapy.”
Some people who experience PTSD may be poor candidates for using firearms. But I sense a wave of “crazed vet” syndrome, similar to what we saw after Vietnam, where media portray vets in general as hair-trigger spree-killers in the making. Veterans are a large enough cohort for almost everything to turn up among us. I dislike the idea that this tragedy means vets can’t be trusted with weapons. A few people who should not have weapons may be vets, but some are women and some are black and some are clergy.