Shy, quiet. Just a weird kid
Shooter came from broken home, write Greg Jaffe and Paul Duggan. Guns and mass killings: The facts
ADAM LANZA was his name.
Adam P Lanza, 20, obscure life, infamous in death.
A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbour in Newtown, Connecticut, recalled him, adding that he was on medications. He was a son of an accountant and a schoolteacher.
And he will long be remembered.
Yesterday morning, police say, he shot and killed his mother in their home.
And then, carrying firearms and an abundance of ammunition, he drove to Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School and started shooting. By the time he turned one of the guns on himself, police say, he had killed 20 children, many of them kindergarteners, and six more adults.
Adam Peter Lanza – a new name to add to a dreadful list, the roster of mass murderers who targeted students: Seung Hui Cho at Virginia Tech (32 dead), Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High in Colorado( 13 dead), Charles Robert IV at a little Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania (five dead). The litany of massacres goes on.
As scores of investigators worked to piece together what happened at the school, and why, the barest details of Lanza’s life began to emerge.
His parents, Nancy and Peter Lanza, separated about a decade ago, and his mother, a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook, remained in the family’s home with her sons, Adam and Ryan Lanza, according to Ryan Kraft, now 25, who was a neighbour.
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The separation hit the children hard, Kraft recalled. When Nancy Lanza would go out to dinner with friends, she sometimes relied on Kraft to watch Adam Lanza, who was too boisterous for Ryan Lanza to manage.
‘‘ He would have tantrums,’’ Kraft said. ‘‘They were much more than the average kid.’’
Yet he was not prone to violence, Kraft said. ‘‘The kids seemed really depressed’’ by the breakup, Kraft said of the Lanza brothers.
Ryan Lanza, 24, now lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was questioned by police yesterday, but law enforcement officials said he was co- operating and is not suspected of having anything to do with the shootings.
For several hours, authorities and the news media misidentified the shooter as Ryan Lanza who, like his father, is an accountant, a law enforcement official said.
Nancy Lanza put the best
face If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.
Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that’s unacceptable.
As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t ‘‘too soon’’. It’s much too late.
What follows here isn’t a policy agenda. It’s simply a set of facts – many of which complicate a search for easy answers – that should inform the discussion we desperately need.
com has tracked and mapped every shooting spree in the past three decades. ‘‘Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,’’ they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally. possible on her domestic troubles, the former neighbour said. ‘‘Nancy was really pleasant,’’ Kraft said. ‘‘She would come by and have a glass of wine with my mom.’’
Beth Israel, who lived for a time on the same street as the Lanzas, recalled Adam Lanza as withdrawn, but not threatening in any
Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.
of the 20 worst mass shootings in the past 50 years took place in the United States. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings. As David Lamp writes at Cato.org, ‘‘In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a licence to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel ‘‘have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States’’.
is an unusually violent country. Kieran Healy, a sociologist at way. ‘‘Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye. Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can’t tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so],’’ she said.
Peter Lanza, a vice- president and tax specialist at GE Energy Duke University, in July made a graph of ‘‘deaths due to assault’’ in the United States and other developed countries. The US is a clear outlier, with rates well above other countries.
ownership in the United States is declining overall. ‘‘For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,’’ political scientist Patrick Egan, of New York University, wrote in July.
Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states.
1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter. The answer, increasingly, is that they don’t. ‘‘The percentage in favour of making the laws governing the sale of firearms more strict fell from 78 per cent in 1990 to 62 per cent in 1995, and 51 per cent in 2007,’’ Gallup reported after the Tucson, Arizona, shooting in 2011.
don’t tend to substantially affect views on gun control. That, at least, is what the Pew Research Center found in a poll taken after the Colorado movie theatre shooting that killed 12. Financial Services, is remarried and lives in Stamford, Connecticut, according to The Stamford Advocate. When he arrived home yesterday and was approached by a reporter, he appeared ‘‘surprised and horrified’’ and declined to comment on the mass shooting.