The Connecticut State Attorney office recently released the much delayed report on the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School
I haven’t the stomach nor heart to read through the details of the crime scene. Within the first day it seemed clear that the emergency response to the report of a shooting was swift and as competent as is possible in such a horrendous event. Far faster and better than the emergency responses at Columbine and VA Tech. (Three to four times faster than the response to Friday’s shooting at Arapahoe High School.) Highly probable that many lives were spared by that quick action.
And all the teachers and staff at the school were heroes in some way.
The report was never intended to speak to, nor should it have, those in some la-la-land that believe the massacre didn’t happen and/or was a false flag operation to take their guns away from them. Those people have such huge clinkers in their thinkers it’s amazing they don’t starve to death because they forgot how to eat. Best to ignore them. (They’ve got guns; so, laughing at them is not recommended.)
While there’s no question that access to guns allowed the shooter to gun down twenty children and four adults and injure two adults in the school that day. The lives of twenty-six innocent families were irrevocably changed by one young man with guns. The parents of some of those slain children that in the midst of their grief advocated for gun control legislation are entitled to admiration. Anyone that butts head against the NRA is admirable. Maybe someday the outcome will be different.
Unfortunately, while this was the saddest of recent mass shootings due to the young age of twenty of victims, it was the least directly relevant to gun control. As the report makes clear, the guns were legally owned. Not by the shooter, but by his mother who shared them with him at a shooting range. The shooter was a few months shy of being old enough to legally purchase and carry a handgun in CT but rifles and shotguns aren’t as restricted.
Interestingly, the investigation couldn’t find evidence that definitively supported the NRA’s La Pierre position that it was a matter of mental illness and not guns that led to the massacre. In a binary – either/or – world, with the polarization of both sides of the question, we aren’t able to honestly consider that it’s both.
Guns and young men are not a good mix. As Jill Balte Taylor points out, our prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully attach until our mid-twenties. In other words, the young aren’t so good at planning and considering consequences. (Suggests that the driving age should be increased to twenty-five.)
So, where does this all leave us? Sadder and no wiser, perhaps.
However, there are some shreds of information in the report that are best not overlooked. Not because they can answer why but because they are instructive for parents.
(Not in the order presented in the report.)
Over the years from the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the shooter had evaluations of various types, some of which were available to the investigators. In the late 1990s he was described as having speech and language needs. At that time he was also being followed medically for seizure activities. In preschool his conduct included repetitive behaviors, temper tantrums, smelling things that were not there, excessive hand washing and eating idiosyncrasies.
In 2005, the shooter was diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder and was described as presenting
with significant social impairments and extreme anxiety.Over the years his mother consistently described the shooter as having Asperger’s syndrome.
She had a number of books in the home on the topic.As he got older his condition seemed to worsen, he became more of a loner.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to raise any child with a special need, disability, or handicap. The medical and educational community does what it can to help – and sometimes is less helpful than it should be. However, it falls most heavily on the parents or full time caregivers to be the most realistic and seek the needed help.
The report doesn’t state if any diagnosis was included in the early evaluations of the Adam or if any special instruction recommendations were followed. Nothing about anti-seizure medication. Evaluations that began before the family moved to CT and Adam was enrolled in elementary school. And appear to have ended in 2005 when he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. This diagnosis was unlikely to have been helpful to Adam or his mother.
The DSM-5 has removed Asperger’s syndrome as a separate clinical diagnosis. It’s apparently not distinguishable enough from higher functioning autism syndrome. Somehow amongst laymen, Asperger’s syndrome came to be seen as being different but highly intelligent (and therefore, was being dangerously abused as a diagnosis). Whereas autism syndrome indicated severe deficits and sounds scary to parents.
Dr. Temple Grandin is living proof that that impression is wrong. She’s highly intelligent and autistic. Plus high intelligence was not a diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s. (Lanza apparently tested within the normal intelligence range.) She is also articulate about the special needs of those with autism.
Based on personal experience, Grandin advocates early intervention to address autism, and supportive teachers who can direct fixations of the child with autism in fruitful directions. She has described her hypersensitivity to noise and other sensory stimuli.
Was Adam more correctly diagnosed when he was very young? Was there any effective intervention at that age? As he seemed to do well enough in the public school primary grades, it seems likely that some good enough intervention occurred. Did that stop when the family moved to CT? Did his mother feel capable of being his therapist? Did she do more than seek another evaluation as he grew older and failed to thrive? Or more likely was regressing. Or did that diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome allow her to be more complacent and hopeful?
It’s not unusual for a parent or day-to-day caregiver not to notice slow deterioration in a child or charge. That’s one reason why continuing consultation with a medical providers is so important. Adam’s mother just wanted her child to succeed. She was also likely in denial as to his limitations. Yanking him in and out of various schools and home schooling him at various times was harmful. Simultaneously increasing the stress for Adam and pampering him. It also precluded the ability of educators to make meaningful assessments of Adam’s development and recommendations for a more healthful living and educational environment. Likely to have begun failing him by the age of ten if not sooner.
What is totally inexplicable is why his mother didn’t appreciate the danger of fixations. While some in and of themselves aren’t necessarily harmful, the thought processes of fixations are harmful to the individual if not to others. Apparently his father and brother weren’t any or much more enlightened on this either. Shooting guns was a family affair. Ending in horror and tragedy.
One message for all is that guns are not therapeutic. Screens? Too soon to tell.
Should specifically note that the report did not indicate that Lanza had any form of mental illness. If he did, it was undiagnosed and there is insufficient information to support postmortem diagnosis. The method of his suicide precluded an autopsy to determine if there was any brain abnormalities such as a tumor.
The pictures of his bedroom windows covered with black plastic sheeting are disturbing, but it’s unclear if that is not unusual for this with autism. What wasn’t displayed were any mirrors in his rooms. If those were covered, that would be highly suggestive of psychotic development.
I posted my comment on the other thread about his mother planning to move, but it’s in line with your observation that the caregiver not noticing slow deterioration. Evidently her plan was to move in response to his increasing reclusiveness. He refused to even go to a hotel nearby while she had the house prepared for sale (so he was going to live in a rec veh in the driveway). Anyway, this is to say imo the prospect of being forced to leave [forever] his room is what precipitated the attack. She really needed the input of a professional presence; bonding over guns is one aspect of her – I’m trying to think of a word, maybe mismanagement
The reports about that planned move were about another college, one that Adam would like well enough that he could then thrive. It was another indication of the mother both coddling and having unreasonably high expectations for her son.
As if she and he weren’t already isolated enough from family, friends, and medical and educational professionals in that great big house, she would relocate them in either Washington or the Carolinas. She must have been ever the optimist, but by then her son was way beyond her ability to manage.
This story reminds me of another Adam. I don’t know the details of the back story and it was before the term autism was in general use. Anyway, Adam was described as different and difficult. He lived in the country in a home that was able to meet his needs — likely not inexpensive (his father was a physician). At ten, when I met him, he was a neat kid if somewhat voluble and hyperactive. His mother and stepfather were in the early stages of transitioning him back to living with them in the city. That was never realized because Adam was great for a few days with them but then began to become out of control. He required the continuing structure and environment his “other family” offered. iirc Adam used the words Mom and Dad when speaking of the adults he lived with even though he was entirely clear as to who his real Mom was and appeared to love visiting her. He was also happy to return to his other family. That was not without pain for his mother but she understood that it was best for her son.
Seems to me that Lanza mother loved too well but not wisely at all. Not too much of a stretch to postulate that her loving created enormous stress and tension between her and her then husband and other child and that neither of them knew what to do about Adam, only that Nancy’s approach didn’t seem to be working. If anywhere close to accurate, a real tragedy that his father didn’t have the benefit of professional advice or if he did, didn’t have any say in the matter.
Generally I recoil at the “blame the mother” orientation that’s prevalent in much psychobabble. However, in this instance, when there was enough money available to facilitate the optimal care for this child, it’s difficult not to see a terribly misguided mother. One that didn’t comprehend the danger of putting guns in the hands of a young man with fixations and obsessions on violence that was very possibly exacerbated by the stress and pressure to move away from the only home he’d known to attend yet another school that would repeat the negative experiences of all the other schools he’d attended.
The other night I went to a holiday party in Columbia Heights, Washington D.C (one of the up and coming gentrified centers with a lot of poor living among a few well-to-do). On my way out of my neighborhood in Alexandria, VA, I saw a bumper sticker:
Link
All I could think when I saw it was, “What’s the point in telling me you’re armed inside your car? If I cut you off are you going to start firing a glock at my windows? Come at me with a vengeance? Ram me with your bumper?”
Gun fetishists are certainly not the worst of the conservative crowd, but I understand them the least, and find them weird as hell. I also stay away from them any chance I get. Knowing this asshole lives in my neighborhood definitely doesn’t make me feel safer, that’s for sure.
That bumper sticker would more accurate if it said, “Armed idiot on board.”
Amazing how firepower confers delusions of omnipotence on so many people. The mentally weak. Precisely the people that are least suited to owning guns.
Oddly enough, threatening bumper stickers might even make it more likely that other drivers will hassle them – rather than deter, those signs serves as a sort of aggressive cue. Then again, the sort of person who puts a sticker like that on their car or truck probably tends to find confrontations an awful lot to begin with – they tend create their own reality in a sense.
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○ Report: Conn. shooter kept mass-murder ‘score sheet’
○ Scientific American: Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker
Cross-posted from my diary – Police Reveal Motive Newtown Shooting Mar. 26, 2013
Lanza wasn’t a savant. He was an autistic kid with massive amounts of high end computer toys that he could indulge in 24/7 with no supervision.
I do think that the Asperger’s diagnostic label that he was given contributed to both his and his mother’s delusion that he was a savant. I applaud the American
Psychiatric Assoc. for removing Asperger’s as a separate clinical diagnostic category in the latest edition of the DSM.
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Posted in my diary – Behind the Tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary – Raising Adam Lanza.
From my personal experience, I would analyze a lack of professional care. Adam Lanza is highly sensitive and lives in his own world of experiences and lacks the ability to build relationships and communicate with persons in his surrounding. As a child he would have experienced change as an abandonment creating anxiety and stress. The parental divorce would be extremely harsh on him, the ultimate event of abandoning him as a father. I read he severed all contacts with his father in 2010 and probably similar with his brother. From that moment in time Adam would suffer severe regression and withdrawel like blinding the windows in his room. His mom tried to get him out of the house and likely the shooting range was a positive effect he would react on. His mom did not understand that this spurned his obsession with guns and the games he played on the Internet and the gun massacres by keeping a tally sheet. Was it a grudge? He did kill his mom first but didn’t bother with his dad. Most likely in his obsession he planned the easiest target to inflict most damage and deaths … his choice for the local elementary school. He decided beforehand he would kill himself without engaging the police in a gun battle. In his mind he couldn’t be flexible and followed the pre-planned motions.
It was a recipe for disaster …
Agree that the absence of quality professional guidance and care seemed to be lacking during Adam’s life. But it was that combined with access to an arsenal that provided the means for him to act out in a most destructive way.
It can’t be stated with any surety that he targeted the elementary school in advance. Apparently he first drove that day to the high school. It’s entirely possible that after killing his mother, he went into a state that compelled him to continue killing as those other school murderers he had become fixated on had done.
Whether his rage didn’t extend to his father and brother or they just weren’t geographically convenient targets for him will never be known. It’s not unimportant that his parents separated in 2001 and divorced a few years later. As that was a dozen years before his rampage, it would not be considered a proximate cause. Also, it was Adam that had cut off contact with his father and brother and that was at least two years before his killing spree.
We really must not forget that stress and the pressure to perform at unrealistic levels is experienced differently for all of us but is most overwhelming for those with particular forms of disorders. In some ways, Lanza’s story is more comprehensible than that of the seemingly normal kid that went after the librarian/debate coach at Arapahoe HS this week. When did young men become so fragile that getting bounced from a team became a license to hunt and shoot the teacher/coach? “Affluenza” may not be a new word that we should joke about. It wasn’t even absent from Lanza’s story.
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That’s a very sloppy NYTimes report. No indication as to when the “Tutoring, desensitization and medication were recommended,…” What the medication was for and if it would have been appropriate or effective. What’s appropriate for a five year old isn’t the same as for a mostly untreated twenty year old.
Was Mrs. Lanza not supposed to leave prepared food for a son dependent on her for meals? Or cook up foods that he didn’t like and would be unlikely to eat in her absence? All the can be gleaned from the reporting is that this twenty year old had yet to achieve enough development that he could manage to put together food to eat from the refrigerator and cupboard for three days. Most kids could do that at half this kid’s age.
As for the attack being “carefully planned” that’s speculative. He destroyed his computer hard drive which could have indicated such planning. Or it could have contained all sorts of thoughts, fixations, etc. that the kid didn’t want others to see. For example, did he have fantasies of matricide or something else? Most of the mass shootings in the US are planned but not to any great degree. The exception would be the Aurora theater shooting that came close to emulating the massacre in Norway, neither of which ended with the shooter’s suicide and both of which had far more victims. It’s not even known if Sandy Hook was a predetermined target site. Although his fixation on mass school shootings would suggest that he might have considered all the schools in Newtown.