According to this, the child was stressed out by the need to achieve and compete. Second, if the kid was improving by mastering target shooting, then the parent had a responsibility to NOT illegaly provide a handgun to the kid. Supervised shooting at the range and a gun safe. Despite this, this was a troubled kid with many problems. Guns didn’t make him a killer. Somehow this kid became a killer, and he was taken out of therapy and off medication way too soon!

No guns for Kinkel, therapist advised

by Joseph B. Frazier
The Associated Press
PORTLAND – A psychologist who treated teenage killer Kip Kinkel before Kinkel’s 1998 high-school rampage said at the time that his patient should never have a gun.

Yet his father, Bill Kinkel, bought him a 9-mm Glock pistol – one of many weapons the youth was to amass before he shot his parents to death and then killed two Thurston High School classmates and wounded 25 others in May 1998.

Kinkel, now 17, was sentenced in November to 112 years in prison.

The revelation of the psychologist’s opinion about Kinkel is in a documentary called “The Killer at Thurston High,” for the PBS show “Frontline.”

The 90-minute documentary, aired last night, depicts Kinkel as a boy who would set off an explosive charge after a bad day at school and who was frustrated by lacking the athletic prowess of the rest of his family.

Kinkel’s older sister, Kristen, said Kinkel had seemed frustrated since the family went to Spain for a year when he was 4. Both parents were Spanish teachers.

“He had just mastered English, then he was in a place where it didn’t work anymore,” she said.

“It was frustrating for him. There were expectations of success, but he seemed lost. He had a hard time reading, writing and spelling.”

The documentary shows home movies of Kristen, an award-winning cheerleader, doing cartwheels and handstands and her brother’s clumsy attempts to imitate her.

Athletic prowess was valued in the family, concluded “Frontline” correspondent Peter Boyer. Kristen and the parents had it. Kip, who also was dyslexic, did not.

He took karate classes. He hung out with a rougher crowd of friends and got in trouble, for shoplifting and then for dropping rocks on cars from an overpass.

His interests drifted to computers, where he found bomb-making sites that made him a young expert at explosives. From there his fascination went to guns.

“Our parents both were really, really concerned about that. He wasn’t even allowed little soldiers. Violence at our house was a huge no-no,” Kristen said.

Friends of the Kinkels said they believed Kip just wore his parents down to the point that they bought guns for him, or his father gave him guns he owned to try to establish a bond.

Kinkel told the psychologist, Dr. Jeffrey Hicks, that his mother saw him as a good kid with bad habits and his father saw him as a bad kid with bad habits.

His parents, sensing there was improvement after Kinkel began getting guns, discontinued his visits to the psychologist and after three months took him off the Prozac that had been prescribed for depression. At his father’s urging, Kinkel turned out for football but at 120 pounds was frustrated. In his journal he wrote, “I don’t know who I am. I want to be something I can never be.”