RISKY MIX: GUN OWNERS WITH DEMENTIA
dementia who waved guns were fatally shot by police. In cases where charges were brought, many assailants were deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Many killed themselves. Among men in the U.S., the suicide rate is highest among those 65 and older; firearms are the most common method, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These statistics do not begin to tally incidents in which a person with dementia waves a gun at an unsuspecting neighbor or a terrified home health aide.
Volunteers with Alzheimer’s San Diego, a nonprofit group, became alarmed when they visited people with dementia to give caregivers a break — and found 25 to 30 percent of those homes had guns, said Jessica Empeño, the group’s vice president.
The group no longer sends volunteers into the homes with weapons, she said.
At the same time, an analysis of government survey data in Washington state found that about 5 percent of respondents 65 and older reported both some cognitive decline and having firearms in their home. The assessment, conducted for KHN by a state epidemiologist, suggests that about 54,000 of the state’s more than 1 million residents 65 and older say they have worsening memory and confusion — and access to weapons.
About 1.4 percent of those respondents 65 and older — representing about 15,000 people — reported both cognitive decline and that they stored their guns unlocked and loaded, according to data from the state’s 2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey. Washington is the only state to track those dual trends, according to the CDC.
In a politically polarized nation, where gun control is a divisive topic, even raising concerns about the safety of cognitively impaired gun owners and their families is controversial. Relatives can take away car keys far easier than removing a firearm, the latter protected by the Second Amendment. Only five states have laws allowing families to petition a court to temporarily seize weapons from people who exhibit dangerous behavior.
But in a country where 10,000 people a day turn 65, the potential for harm is growing, said Dr. Emmy Betz, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, a leading researcher on gun access and violence.
By 2050, the number of people with dementia who live in U.S. homes with guns could reach between roughly 8 million and 12 million, according to a May study by Betz and her colleagues.
“You can’t just pretend it’s not going to come up,” Betz said. “It’s going to be an issue.”
Polling conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation for this story suggests that few Americans are concerned about the potential dangers of elders and firearms. Nearly half of people queried in a nationally representative poll in June said they had relatives over 65 who have guns. Of those, more than 80 percent said they were “not at all worried” about a gun-related accident.
Dee Hill had ignored her husband’s demands and sold Darrell’s car when it became too dangerous for him to drive. But guns were another matter.
“He was just almost obsessive about seeing his guns,” Dee said.
Though Dee would lock the guns in a vault in the carport, she relented after Darrell had asked, repeatedly, to check on the guns he’d carried every day of his nearly 50-year law enforcement career.
She intended to briefly show him two of his six firearms, the Glock handgun and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. But after he saw the weapons, Darrell accidentally knocked the empty pouch that had held the revolver to the floor. When Dee bent to pick it up, he somehow grabbed the Glock and fired.
“My concern (had been) that someone was going to get hurt,” she said. “I didn’t in my wildest dreams think it was going to be me.”
An investigation classified the incident as an assault and referred it to Wasco County District Attorney Eric Nisley, who concluded it was “a conscious act” to pick up the gun, but that Darrell didn’t intend to harm his wife.
“I evaluated it as if a 5- or 6-year-old would pick up the gun and shoot someone,” Nisley said.
Dee was outraged at the suggestion she consider pressing charges. “I didn’t want anyone to think it was intentional. Nobody would have believed it anyway,” she said.
Proponents of gun ownership say guns are not to blame.
The National Rifle Association declined to comment.
But Dr. Arthur Przebinda, who represents the group Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, said researchers raising the issue wanted to curtail gun rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and were “seeking ways to disarm as many people as possible.”
Focusing on the potential of people with dementia shooting others is a “bloody shirt-waving tactic that’s used to stir emotions to advance support for a particular policy endpoint,” he said.
“I’m not disputing the case that it happens. I know it can happen,” Przebinda said. “My question is how prevalent it is, because the data is what should be driving our policy discussion, not fear or fear-mongering. It’s bad science.”
Two decades of Nra-backed political pressure that quashed public health research into the effects of gun violence partly explain the lack of data, experts said. But that doesn’t mean there’s no problem, said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-davis.
“(Critics) are arguing as if what we have is evidence of absence,” he said. “We have something quite different, which is absence of evidence.”
Even some families grappling with the problem are wary about calls to limit gun access.
“I hope your intent is not to ‘bash’ us for our beliefs and actions with guns,” said Vergie “Verg” Scroughams, 63, of Rexburg, Idaho, who showed KHN reporters how she hid a loaded gun from her husband, who developed dementia after a stroke in 2009.
Verg became worried after Delmar Scroughams, 83, grew angry and erratic earlier this year, waking up in the night and threatening to hit her. It was out of character for the former contractor.
“In 45 years of marriage, we’ve never had a big fight,” Verg said.
Six months ago, she took the loaded .38-caliber Ruger from a drawer near Delmar’s living room recliner, removed the bullets, and tucked the gun under socks in a box in her closet. “He’ll never look there,” she said.
She doesn’t want Delmar to have access to that gun or to his collection of six shotguns locked in the bedroom cabinet. But Verg, a real estate agent who shows homes in remote locations, doesn’t want to give up the weapons she counts on for comfort and protection. She carries her own handgun in the console ofhercar.
“Guns have been a big part of our lives,” said Verg, who got her first rifle at age 12 and fondly recalls hunting trips with her sons. “I can’t imagine living without guns.”
Guns under the pillows
Federal law prohibits people who are not mentally competent to make their own decisions, including those with advanced dementia, from buying or owning firearms. But a mere diagnosis of dementia does not disqualify someone from owning a gun, said Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. If a gun owner were reluctant to give up his arsenal, his family would typically have to take him to court to evaluate competency.
Eleven states have passed “red flag” gun laws that allow law enforcement or other state officials, and sometimes family members, to seek a court order to temporarily seize guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or others. Red flag bills have proliferated across the country since the Parkland shooting; six were passed this year and six more are pending.
In Connecticut, which in 1999 enacted the nation’s first red flag law, police used the measure to seize guns from five people reported to have dementia in 2017, according to a KHN records review.
In 2008, police in Manchester, Conn., seized nine firearms from a 70-year-old man with dementia who had pointed a gun at his daughter when she went to check on him because he didn’t recognize her at first. The man had been sleeping with loaded guns under his pillows.
In Ohio, at one memory care clinic, 17 percent of patients diagnosed with dementia reported having a firearm in their homes, according to a 2015 Cleveland Clinic study.
But many families are reluctant to take away the sense of safety, independence and identity that their loved one derives from guns.
‘A guilt I’ll never ever get away from’
In the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, Malissa Helmandollar, a 46-year-old assistant in an optometrist’s office, regrets not taking her father’s guns away.
Her dad, Larry Dillon, loved to hunt. Even after a coal-mining accident left him paralyzed from the waist down at age 21, Dillon would shoot turkey, squirrel and deer from the seat of his four-wheeler. For as long as Helmandollar could remember, her father kept a gun under the cushion of his wheelchair.
“He felt he couldn’t take care of us, or himself, without it,” she said.
In June 2017, when her father was 65, she began to notice strange behavior.
“He would see people crawling out of the washing machine,” she said. He forgot how to tell time. Sometimes he would just stare at his dinner plate “like he didn’t know what to do.”
Every night for weeks, Dillon grew scared that people were trying to break in and burn his house down, Helmandollar said. Dillon slept with a 9 mm semiautomatic Glock pistol at his nightstand in the double-wide trailer he shared with his wife, Sandy, in Princeton, W.VA.
Helmandollar made an appointment for him to see a neurologist, but he never made it to the doctor.
Five days before his appointment, on July 6, 2017, Helmandollar’s 9-year-old daughter was sleeping over at her Mamaw and Papaw’s house, as she loved to do. That evening, Helmandollar got a frantic call from her daughter.
Helmandollar sped to the house with her son. She found her stepmother, Sandy, dead in an armchair with several bullet wounds. Helmandollar heard her father tell police that he saw intruders breaking in to the house, so he grabbed his Glock and started shooting in the bedroom where his wife and granddaughter were watching TV.
But there had been no intruders that night. Dillon, who was deemed incompetent to stand trial for murder, was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease whose early symptoms can include visual hallucinations.
Helmandollar said her father never understood what he had done.
“It crossed my mind that maybe I should’ve taken the guns, and I didn’t,” Helmandollar said. “It’ll be a guilt that I’ll never ever get away from.”
Belated diagnoses of dementia are too common, according to Dr. Melissa Henston, a geriatric psychologist in Denver who administers cognitive exams that can confirm impairment. She said many of the patients she sees have moderate or even severe dementia before being diagnosed.
“There’s denial and a false belief that a lot of cognitive problems are just normal for age,” she said. “These conversations that need to take place never take place until it’s too late.”
About one-third of people with the disease become combative during the course of their illness, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. And more than 20 percent who develop dementia become violent toward their caretakers, a 2014 study showed.
Advocates have long warned patients and families about the potential risk of guns, said Beth Kallmyer, the Alzheimer’s Association vice president of care and support.
“The reality is, there’s no way to know who’s at risk for becoming agitated or even violent,” she said.
‘We need to pay more attention’
In Minnesota, Sharon Van Leer, the 70-year-old director of diversity and inclusion at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said she never would have predicted the phone call she got from police nearly three years ago.
Her father, Kenneth Bowser, a 90-year-old Army veteran and retired postal worker, had been living for many years with his oldest son, Larry, 65, in the St. Paul suburb of Maplewood.
At 5:30 p.m. Sept. 12, 2015, Kenneth Bowser dialed 911.
“Who is bothering you?” the dispatcher asked him, according to a transcript of the call.
“My oldest son, oldest son and I shot him, I shot him,” Bowser replied. “He’s laying there dead, dead.”
“Where is the gun?” the dispatcher asked.
“The gun is in my hand,” Bowser said.
Van Leer said she believed her father never intended to be violent: “Daddy was never like that.”
In the 911 call, Bowser appears confused. “I’m 70 — uh, 100 — 91 years old,” he said. “I’m paralyzed on one side.”
Bowser, who had not been diagnosed with dementia before the shooting, was confirmed to have Alzheimer’s and deemed not competent to stand trial.
Now Van Leer drives 90 minutes most Sundays to visit her father in a locked, state-run nursing home where he’s set to spend the rest of his life. Staff wheel him out to a windowless visitation room, where Van Leer and her sister spoon-feed him nutrition shakes and give him back rubs.
Van Leer said she had noticed some signs of decline before the shooting — he would leave bacon on the stove and burn it, or forget where he put his cigars. But because she did not live with him, she said, she didn’t realize how far his dementia had progressed.
“We need to pay more attention, as our parents get older, to the changes,” Van Leer said. “They can disguise it really well.”
Removing guns from the home is the best way to prevent violence, the Alzheimer’s Association and other experts advise.
But Dr. Diana Kerwin, director of the Texas Alzheimer’s and Memory Disorders program at Texas Health, said that’s not the answer for all families.
“I don’t do a blanket ‘guns are bad, you can’t have guns in the home,’ ” she said.
Instead, she advocates storing guns safely — locked up, unloaded, with the ammunition kept separate from the guns. Firearms can also be disabled .
Giving up the guns
For families grappling with such decisions, one option is to establish a “gun trust” that outlines how the weapons will pass to family members once a person becomes incapacitated or dies. These trusts may make it easier for people who must give up firearms to move into a nursing home, for instance, said David Goldman, an estate-planning lawyer in Jacksonville, Fla., who said he has drawn up more than 20,000 gun trusts. But the process works best when the gun owner complies.
“They rarely want to give up their guns,” Goldman said. Another obstacle is that gun trusts must be drawn up before dementia becomes too advanced.
Ideally, families should discuss firearm access soon after a diagnosis of dementia and consider setting a “firearm retirement date,” akin to an advance directive for guns, Betz and colleagues advise. It’s similar to discussions about taking away the car keys when driving becomes dangerous, she said.
“One of the tricky things is, for driving, there are some assessments you can do,” Betz said. “They’re not perfect, but they’re helpful. There isn’t anything for firearms.”
Doctors who routinely ask dementia patients about driving should also ask about guns, Wintemute said. Too often, though, they don’t.
“Docs say: ‘I don’t know enough about the risks and benefits, I don’t have the time,’ ” Wintemute said. “Only about onethird do it with any frequency.”
Critics of gun restrictions like Przebinda argue that the essential difference between driving and guns is that one is a privilege and the other is a constitutional right.
“The two are not the same,” he said. “You do not have a right to conveyance. You have a right to self-defense, you have a right to protecting your home and your family that’s intrinsic to you as a human being.”
He balks at any formal assessment of firearm use among people with dementia, saying it could lead to “a totalitarian system that decides when you can have rights and when you cannot.”
Instead, the decision should be left to families, Przebinda said. “People who own guns know what measures are available to them.”
Even that knowledge, however, may not be enough. Dee Hill of Oregon said it was “strictly an accident” that her husband, the retired sheriff, shot and critically wounded her.
“He spent darn near 40, almost 50 years, in law enforcement, and a gun was always with him, and so to deprive him of not even seeing them, in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t deny him,” she said.
For Verg and Delmar Scroughams of Idaho, the dilemma of keeping guns in the house remains. In a lucid moment in May, Delmar acknowledged that the weapons he’s had all his life could be dangerous.
“I got a disease I don’t know the name of and, eventually, anything could happen,” he said.
Such moments of awareness are becoming rare, Verg admitted. Soon, Delmar may no longer recognize her. As his condition worsens, she said, it’s up to her to make sure no one is harmed.
“I would feel extremely responsible,” she said. “It would be my fault.”
KHN’S coverage of these topics is supported by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, John A. Hartford Foundation and The SCAN Foundation