In his memoir, Inside Delta Force, former U.S. Army commando Eric Haney states that would-be military snipers are screened to keep out two types of problematic personalities:
“Munich Massacre Syndrome” - that is, snipers who become so empathetic to their human target after observing and watching their target from long distance for days, that their eventual empathy causes them to be unable to pull the trigger when the time comes, because their targets have become humanized to them, and they can’t bring themselves to kill them. Haney states that this is the reason German snipers failed to kill the Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics standoff; they just couldn’t pull the trigger.
and
“Texas Sharpshooter Syndrome” - that is, someone who gets this sudden euphoric high from shooting the bad guys during a combat situation - a hostage rescue or whatever it may be - that he actually starts shooting good guys or innocents even after the bad guys are now all neutralized. He keeps on shooting because he is in a frenzied high and feels so powerful.
Now, about the latter, have there ever been any documented cases of this sniper-gone-rogue syndrome in real life? Where a police or military sniper got so excited after shooting the bad guys that he started shooting good guys as well, just to keep the killing going?
Without answering your question directly, but sincerely engaging the broader topic, it sounds like the author of that book took two historical incidents and then just made some shit up.
Which leads me to believe the most likely answer to your question is “no” since not even the Texas tower shooter (the historical murderer I believe is being referenced) did what he did for the “frenzied high,” at least so far as anyone could tell based on the totality of the circumstances. I mean, even if you don’t buy the “brain tumor” explanation, the fact that he killed members of his family first and wrote a note explaining himself beforehand would seem to undermine any notions of a “frenzied high.” Sociopathic or dissociative, maybe, but not a frenzied high.
I agree that “Texas Sharpshooter” was a misleading term for Haney to use, since Whitman wasn’t a good guy at all (and Haney was discussing specifically a police or military sniper gone crazed by bloodlust who starts going after his own colleagues and innocents after he’s disposed the bad guys), but that’s the term he coined for the syndrome.
I just wanted to ask if any such incidents had happened in real life, since Haney felt a need to write about it - it led me to believe there had been such an incident where a police or military sniper suddenly became unstoppable due to the bloodlust of the moment. I don’t have a copy of the book on hand at the moment, but Haney’s words were (as best as I can recall or paraphrase): “Shooting can suddenly feel so good that a sniper can’t stop…Such a sniper will go on shooting anyone in sight; he’ll keep on shooting even after there are no legitimate targets left, until he runs out of ammunition. It’s a very real thing, and I’ve heard its own siren call in my ear.”
The police riflemen who failed at Fürstenfeldbruck were just regular policemen armed with the same service rifles the West German army had at that time - nothing special. Their only qualification was that they did a bit of recreational shooting at weekends, which would be more than most West German policemen were doing.
What I mean to suggest is that if such an incident HAD happened in real life, perhaps that would have been the incident the author chose as a namesake for his hypothesized “good guy turned frenzied shooter”?
Like, there’s a reason why they call ALS “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Because he actually had it. Not that he was the first, but he had it. They didn’t need to create a fictional claim that some other famous person died from ALS and call it’s “Some Other Famous Person’s disease” because somebody famous actually had it and died from complications. See?
Gotcha. Either Haney chose a really bad misleading name for the “syndrome”, or maybe he is describing a psychological phenomenon that represents a real potential danger that just hasn’t manifested in a real life tragedy yet.
I’m not even satisfied he is describing a real psychological problem that could manifest. It seems to me that he is quite likely embellishing what they are actually screening for. For instance, they may well screen for Whitman-esque sociopaths, but not necessarily because they’re afraid they’ll go on a frenzied shooting spree in the field.
ETA: Ditto with the Munich thing. I’m satisfied that police snipers may have performed poorly there, I’m just not satisfied by his representations as to why.
It seems to me the first place to look here would be whether or not the US Army actually screens for this alleged deficiencies. I am struggling to understand how they would. How would these be predicted?
And it’s worth noting Haney’s story about Munich is just false. I don’t know if he’s full of shit or if this is just a story he was told in the Amry (believe me, in the Army, military themed urban legends are very common and treated as truth) but it’s just total bunk in every respect. There is nothing about what he says that is true.
Taking Haney’s “siren call” remark (see post 3) at face value, that sounds to my layman’s ears* a bit like “call of the void” Link. I haven’t had the stray thought to leap from a high place, but I have had the stray thought (NOT urge) that I could leap in front of a passing express train as I was on the platform. Not “I want to…” but “it would be so damned easy to … if I wanted to.” Which in this context would behoove the police force or military providing the means to make it “so damned easy” (that is, providing rifle, ammunition, and training) to take precautions against “if I wanted to” coming to mind. :eek:
*Layman vis a vis a shooter or a psychologist.
His examples are hyperbole. The failures in Munich had nothing to do with empathetic snipers, and Charles Whitman was up there shooting at everyone indiscriminately. Everyone was a target. So, to say that he ran out of targets but was hyped up that he just started shooting innocent people is just asinine. If everyone is a target to being with, how do you run out of targets? But that’s not really what he was claiming.
The terms were never meant to describe the actual events, mental faculty, or psychological health of their namesakes. They came up with those terms to describe actual phenomenon experienced by snipers in Vietnam using the best, most descriptive examples they could think of. John Bredin has it on the nose with his mention of “Call of the Void”. It’s that sort of thing. These are just two types of weird feelings that people in those situations had experienced personally or heard others talk about. So they were known impulses, but they weren’t named anything. So these guys came up with these “syndromes”. Just like the impulse to jump of a roof, bite cute things, etc., these are real impulses, but they didn’t actually have anything to do with the Munich or Texas incidents. It’s just the example he came up with to describe and name the phenomenon.
By screening out people in either group 1 or group 2, he’s basically saying they want to make sure someone is mentally stable enough to be a Delta sniper. They don’t want someone too eager or too hot headed, or they might lose control (scenario 2), but they also don’t want someone who is too empathetic and too much of a little bitch to take the shot at the decisive moment when it matters most (scenario 1).
Think of what he’s saying as
“If you get too hyped on adrenaline and you’re too hot headed once you’re out of targets, you may have strange urges to act like that Texas tower shooter, and just start shooting everyone. We call this strange impulse, the Texas Tower Syndrome.”
Rather than:
“Charles Whitman shot a bunch of people because he suffered from Texas Tower Syndrome”.
If g-you can’t come up with a case in point for a proposed phenomenon, then is it really a phenomenon?
I continue to view with skepticism the notion that “this is a real thing,” even as the namesakes are so clearly distorted from the reality of what actually happened. Like when you get directed to a YouTube rant video where the person is ranting at a supposedly real bunch of people (millennials, boomers, snowflakes, take your pick), and yet, to the extent they provide any kind of cite for their claims that such people exist and possess the views they are railing against, a close reading of the cite in full context makes it very clear that they are being misrepresented.
But I get why Velocity has started this thread. He wants to know if there ARE indeed such people, however inaptly named the phenomena are. I’m just continuing in the vein of “if they couldn’t find an example that actually happened to name the phenomenon after, then it stands to reason that it never actually happened, which makes me doubt it could even be considered a phenomenon, regardless of what some guy said in his book or not, regardless of what the folks who screen/train snipers actually told him.”
How many people have been so overcome by the Call of the Void that they jumped off a roof. I’m not talking about people who wanted to commit suicide, that’s not what it describes. These are people who were up high and had a feeling that they should jump.
How many of those people actually jumped?
Or people who have an urge to swerve into oncoming traffic? How many actually do it? Any documented cases?
Or bite their babies face? How many people give in to that urge?
These are real urges, even if there are no documented examples of someone being so overcome that they went through with it. But many people can share that they’ve experienced these things.
As for the snipers. If (and a big if), there is an actual case of someone being so overcome with these impulses, that they acted on them, then you’re not likely to find an example. It’s not police snipers who are shooting so many people that they get overwhelmed and keep shooting civilians. It’s military snipers. And in the areas where it is most likely to occur, it is least likely to be discovered and documented.
I’m sorry if I don’t consider a book written by (or ghostwritten for?) an ex-delta sniper with the intent of telling exaggerated tales to boost sales to the general public to be a good source of truth.
I will believe that there is such a thing as “Texas sharpshooter syndrome” or “Munich massacre syndrome” when it has actually been demonstrated to exist. There is a huge difference between screening out certain personality disorders or attempting to identify conscientious objectors vs what those syndromes supposedly describe.
If, as you seem to posit, lots of people have these thoughts described by these syndromes, and yet no one has ever ACTUALLY acted on them, then why the concern in screening them out? If, on the other hand, some non-zero number of people have had these thoughts and actually acted on them, then where/who are they? Point to them. It seems the most likely candidates would be the syndromes’ namesakes, and yet, as it seems we both agree and I keep coming back to, neither of them actually represents the phenomenon they are supposed to represent.
I think you’re taking the whole thing way too literally. He isn’t claiming to be a psychologist. He’s not trying to propose a psychiatric condition to be added to the lexicon of mental health journals.
He was simply saying that they need people to be mentally balanced. They can’t have people being too empathetic, and they don’t want people who are too hot headed.
It’s not hard to find examples of soldiers losing their shit and going on shooting sprees.
It’s not hard to imagine, for anyone who has been in that situation, that when you’re in a firefight where your enemy is embedded into the civilian population and you can’t find any enemy to shoot, you may feel the same desire to just fucking shoot someone, especially if you or your teammates just got attacked, but the enemy disappeared into the village before you could return fire. Now you’re scanning the village looking for payback, but you can’t find any.
Or, you do find one, and you kill him. But you realize after killing that guy, that you’ve just been overcome by a euphoric rush of adrenaline, power, self-confidence, invincibility, and a desire for more of that feeling! Then your brain starts to remind you of things like, you could shoot that random person over there and get away with it. With all the shit that just happened, nobody would think twice about it. He looks like the rest of them. . . etc., etc.
Is that an actual medically-documented phenomenon? That’s not really the point. There are enough people who have admitted to having such passing thoughts and these odd, but brief, feelings, that Haney decided to give it a name.
It’s possible that it is actually part of a larger, known medical phenomenon. One that is actually documented with other examples. Maybe it actually is some recognized type of Call of the Void. Maybe what was called “Munich Massacre Syndrome” is actually a form of Stockholm Syndrome. But Haney isn’t a psychologist. He wouldn’t know that. He’s coming up with his own names and explanations. Whatever you want to call it, and however you want to describe it, the thing he is talking about is a real and normal thing. It’s as real and as normal as people who say they’ve had thoughts about swerving into traffic. Or people who want to jump off the bridge.
Interesting that Oedipus was a fictional character, and there probably are no examples of anyone accidentally killing his father and marrying his mother. Yet, Freud’s Oedipus Complex stood as a valid psychoanalytic theory for decades. And he was an actual neurologist.
Haney is an old operator from over 40 years ago, writing about events 20+ years after he experienced them. The terms “Munich Massacre Syndrome” and “Texas Sharpshooter Syndrome” make perfect sense in the context and manner in which he described them, provided you understand that he’s just trying to describe two extreme ends of a spectrum, and how they need people in the middle. Mentally balanced. He even explains in the book that they made these terms up. But they didn’t invent the emotions/thoughts that he’s characterizing. Those are real phenomenon. Not strong enough to overpower a normal person’s will. But they are real enough that people often say, “Yea, I felt that. I know what you mean. Weird, right?”
To the extent it’s true that these “syndromes” (which I have only *found in relation to his book) represent actual phenomena, it isn’t particularly profound. To the extent it’s profound, it isn’t true. That’s all I’m saying.
It appears he has grossly exaggerated genuine psychiatric phenomena for the purpose of being salacious, and so 1) I am not particularly impressed by his ability to make shit up and stick a label on it, and 2) I think it unlikely that anyone will be able to provide actual examples of the phenomenon Velocity is asking about. The guy made very specific claims that may not be falsifiable in the most general sense (can’t prove a negative, can’t prove that no one could ever turn from disciplined sniper to frenzied killer and start shooting people at random for the thrill of it, mid-engagement), but is absolutely falsifiable in the case of its namesake. Ditto for the “Munich massacre syndrome” which is not only total BS, but strikes me as incredibly disrespectful to both the snipers and the victims in that case. There were problems with how the German police responded, but too much empathy for a bunch of terrorist hostage-takers wasn’t one of them.
*Okay, actually, a search for “Texas sharpshooter syndrome” does yield quite a few results, but those that pre-date or seem independent of the book seem to refer to a kind of logical fallacy whereby one shoots at a barn or some other far away object, and then paints more precise targets for a bullseye around each bullet hole after the fact so it looks like they accomplished some amazing feat of marksmanship when in fact all they really did was hit the broadside off a barn. Clearly not what the author is describing. I saw nothing in the way of scholarly discourse related to these phenomena, much less actual examples.
And just to be clear, Bear_Nenno, and getting back to the OP, you’re saying you agree with me that this has probably never happened in real life? Whatever urges people may or may not feel?
