What We Could Have Learned About the Dallas Sniper

If we are going to use robots in police standoffs, we should use them for impairment and not killing a citizen of the United States. It is more important to have the person alive to study cause and effect than to kill an individual out of revenge.
A kill limits us to learn why tragic events happen. In the case of the Dallas shooting, it would have been a great opportunity to question and learn from the shooter what made him become the person that shot and killed 5 officers. This was not a typical profile. The shooter was a 2 time Afghan soldier and someone that worked with people with disabilities. Something drove this young man to the brink of madness. Unfortunately, we may never know what happened.
More importantly, with all of the Veterans Affairs problems, it is important to study such an individual. He obviously had mental health issues. And, there is a very scary coincidence that the shooter was from Dallas Texas.

Remember the movie American Sniper. The movie ends without explaining how Chris Kyle's life ended. Chris Kyle came home only to be shot and killed by another Veteran of Foreign War Eddie Routh.  Routh killed Chris and his friend Chad Littlefield. It would have been very powerful to explore the events that unfolded that day.

We may never know how coincidental the two tragedies were in comparison. However here are some details of Routh's life:

He was admitted to the Veterans Administration hospital in Dallas for the first time in July 2011 and diagnosed with PTSD. Doctors prescribed a raft of antipsychotic and anti-anxiety drugs, including Risperidone, a powerful antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia. Meanwhile, he steadily self-medicated with alcohol and marijuana. In September 2012, police picked him up walking down the road, incoherent, and he was brought to the VA hospital, suffering from what psychiatrists there called a major depressive illness and psychotic delusions. He was again given medication and discharged. He would seem better for a time, and he even found a girlfriend, Jennifer Weed, whom he had met online. They briefly lived together. She later recalled that he sometimes talked as though he had, in fact, seen action in Iraq, saying: "I've killed before, and I'll do it again." On Jan. 19, 2013, he had another psychotic episode, holding Weed and her roommate prisoner in their apartment while brandishing a knife until police arrived, and he landed at the VA hospital once more. But after a five-day stay, he was released again.

Routh's mother, Jodi, had pleaded with the VA doctors not to release her son. Exhausted and running out of options, she turned to Chris Kyle. His two kids attended the elementary school where she worked, so when he came to pick up his children, she approached him as a last resort. She said that she had heard he was spending a lot of time helping other veterans with disabilities and PTSD and told him about Eddie's deepening crisis. He promised to reach out to her son.

Hopefully, a closer examination of the Dallas shooter will give us insight into the Veterans returning home from modern warfare. Did the VA clinic in Dallas again play a role in the returning veteran not getting services they need? We need to transition from revenge to finding answers. It is hard to have empathy for anyone that commits such an act, however something acted as a trigger. We need to find out what caused such a young man to shoot and kill the 5 police officers. The best way to honor the men and women in blue is to help learn how to avoid such tragedies in the future.