The impulses that drove Army Specialist Ivan Lopez into a shooting spree and then to take his own life at Fort Hood clearly rose from a dark well of emotional disturbance.
When he pulled the trigger of the .45-caliber Smith & Wesson that he had brought onto the base in violation of regulations, Lopez was, by all accounts, not the man or the soldier who was familiar to friends and comrades.
Only one indication that he was suffering is known to have come to light.
Secretary of the Army John McHugh said that Lopez, an Iraq war veteran, was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder and had been prescribed medications to treat anxiety and depression. There was no sign that Lopez was a threat to himself or others, McHugh said.
That assessment demands full review, as does weapons security on the sprawling base — site of the 2009 mass killing by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was motivated by radical Islamism.
Formal inquiries must determine whether the three people killed by Lopez might have been saved, whether the 16 people he wounded might have been spared and whether, with proper attention, Lopez himself might have been pulled back from the abyss.
Although the picture of why and how Lopez descended into fatal irrationality remains to be filled in, the tragedy is set against the backdrop that many veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war era are plagued by emotional and psychological scars.
Roughly 1,000 are diagnosed every week with post-traumatic stress disorder and some 800 are diagnosed with depression, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both can be debilitating and damage family relationships and careers.
The most severe cases of emotional trauma have produced an epidemic of suicides, both by troops in uniform and by veterans. Using partial statistics because there is no national database, the VA has estimated that at least 22 veterans kill themselves every day.
That astonishingly horrifying number comes out to more than 2,000 suicides so far this year and works out to more than 8,000 by the end of the year. Lopez on Wednesday became one of the statistics.
Suicide rates among veterans 18 to 24 years old — while a small fraction of the overall total — are four times higher than for non-veterans of the same age group.
Given the figures, it is perfectly believable that 51% of the veterans questioned for a poll released this week reported knowing an Iraq or Afghanistan service member who has attempted or committed suicide.
Whatever the devils that may or may not have gripped Lopez, the invisible and often fatal wounds borne without help by too many of America’s veterans are a national disgrace.
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