Who is Connecticut Shooter Adam Lanza? A smart, quiet, socially awkward, loner.
Why am I not surprised at the descriptions of Adam Lanza the Connecticut shooter who killed 20 children and six adults, including his own mother? He’s described as a smart honor student who was socially awkward, a loner who had no friends and who many saw as a very troubled young man. At age 20 he still lived at home with his mother and had no friends. Earlier in his life, he had no friends. Classmates in his high school didn’t think that he actually graduated with them since no one remembers him.
From this ABC article, “Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described Nancy as rigid. “[Adam] was not connected with the other kids,” said Barbara Frey, who also said he was “a little bit different … Kind of repressed.”
“You could tell that he felt so uncomfortable about being put on the spot,” said Olivia DeVivo, also now at the University of Connecticut. “I think that maybe he wasn’t given the right kind of attention or help. I think he went so unnoticed that people didn’t even stop to realize that maybe there’s actually something else going on here — that maybe he needs to be talking or getting some kind of mental help. In high school, no one really takes the time to look and think, ‘Why is he acting this way?’ ”
“They weren’t surprised,” she said. “They said he always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he just didn’t really connect with our high school, and didn’t really connect with our town.”
She added: “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”
Adam didn’t even have a picture in this senior yearbook. ”Camera Shy”. It’s not clear if he had Asperger’s syndrome or a personality disorder such as schizoid personality disorder. Both have problems with social interaction, making friends, and the latter can be connected to schizophrenia. Adam’s brother, Ryan, describes him as having a personality disorder.
More about Adam Lanzer here and here and here. According to this article, people knew when he was 5 years old that he had problems. Why didn’t he get help??? Why didn’t he get help throughout his life? What the heck was wrong with his parents that this kid wasn’t in therapy, if not locked up?
Doesn’t this all sound familiar? A loner who has had problems with relationships throughout his life and then goes on a shooting rampage? A very smart kid who never had any friends? A loner to the point that no one remembers him from high school? Why aren’t kids like this getting help very early in their lives when it’s obvious that they have problems establishing friendships, before they are spending their lives like Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski , in their parent’s basement or a cabin in the woods, where their behavior and thoughts become even more dangerous with their increased social isolation? When will teachers and parents realize that kids without friends, without social interactions, need HELP and get them the help that they need? Is it time to hold parent’s responsible for not getting their kids help? For not informing authorities that their children’s behavior is alarming?
We’ve heard this same pattern, over and over and over. It’s high time our society did something to help these kids, and help their parents to recognize the seriousness of a child without friends and one who is socially isolated. It’s an alarm bell! It’s also time to keep dangerous people away from the rest of us, even over their objections. Tech shooter, Cho, should never have been released from a mental hospital. His rights to not be kept in mental hospital should never have superseded the rights of 32 people to live their lives.
It’s time to change mental health laws in this country.
22 Responses to “Who is Connecticut Shooter Adam Lanza? A smart, quiet, socially awkward, loner.”
It is crazy what’s going on in this world, but not surprise because this world is coming to its end and the evil is multiplying. the devil is using these trouble kids to perform these crazy acts of evil and then take their own life. Parents need to see these signs on their children and get them help, parents only you know better who children are and if you see the signs and get the help then you should be held accountable for their actions
That is the problem. The hospitals are closed and you can not hold them. I called for my daughter and she was arrested, charged for battery on a police officer. Sent to jail for a year and recieved no help. She was hallucinating and not hurting anyone, just pulled away from the deputy not wanting to go. She didn’t understand she was being taken to the doctors. You can not find help with todays laws.
I am so sorry that you are having to deal with this. You are so right, the laws must be changed so that the families can get help for their loved ones.
I agree that the devil does use these troubled kids. I Peter 5:8 “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Since this person who committed this horrible act was 20 years old, according to reports, what could the mother do? He was an adult. Short of having him committed to a mental health institution and that’s hard to do what could she have done? She may have tried to help him. We don’t know either way. He was an adult and he made his own decision. I do know one thing. Those of us who are Christians need to step out of our comfort zone and start sharing the Gospel not in deed only but also in word. There is a world of suffering and hurt since Adam and Eve decided to turn from God and try to do life on their own which is really death. Please, when you celebrate Christmas, and celebrate you must, remember the reason for Christmas. God loves us so much He sent his son to pay for all sins and that by receiving Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior we are freed from death and the power of sin. God is going to bring about a new heaven and a new earth where there will be no more sin, suffering, tragedy and death.
To the author of this article, how do you know what really was going on in that family? Why are you assuming that kids who have problems should be locked away, even?
I am the mother of a 21 yr old, very highly gifted young man. He lives at home – he attends a local university, and it is, quite honestly, more economical for him to live at home. You have, I assume, read some of the myriad articles out about young adults graduating with a mountain of debt – and limited job prospects?
Last year, my son had no friends, no social life. He was retreating. I now recognize that he had depression, and eventually recognized it (no sadness, btw, but changes in sleep, appetite, withdrawing from normal activities) and sought medical care for him. I am fortunate in that, while he denied being depressed, he was willing for me to take him. Many 20 yr olds would not be compliant.
My son, however, was never a threat to anyone. The fact that he was a quiet, bright loner did not mean he had any inclination to get a gun and shoot anyone.
You talk about the shooter’s mother as being at fault. That may be. That may not be. And the woman isn’t alive to defend herself. However, at a certain point, a person is responsible for his own actions. By 20, I believe, he was. No more laying the blame on less than perfect parents. We are all less than perfect. We all make mistakes, yes even with raising our kids, the most important job on the planet. Some children come from unloving, abusive homes, and still manage to live a full life without killing anyone. The shooter was the only one who picked up that gun with the intent to kill, and he was the only one who did the killing. Place the blame where it belongs, on his feet.
In the greater conversation, we must address other things, of course, and that includes adequate access to good mental health care. It also includes appropriate gun regulation and a need to shift our culture to no longer glorify killing. Watch any war movie or spy thriller, and tell me that there is no glorification.
Impossible? Remember when DUI was considered fairly normal? Then we shifted, and the term “designated driver” came into use. While there are still drunk drivers, there are fewer of them as a percentage. We also changed attitudes towards smoking. Yes, people smoke, but it is no longer viewed as cool or as socially acceptable as it once was. So it is possible to change a culture. All we need is the will.
Riley, I know this request is a little out of the norm, and I won’t be offended if you remove the link, but I’d like to share this post with you and your readers:
http://woodbridge-va.patch.com/blog_posts/whats-the-first-thing
Connie,
That is a good and wise response to a tragic event.
If a child goes all the way through school with no friends, something’s wrong. Perhaps we’ll find out that the parents sought help for him since he was a very young child, but I haven’t found anything that says he was ever in therapy or ever got any help. Yes, he is responsible for what he did, but are the parents not responsible for getting this lonely kid help? Did they recognize that being this much of a loner is not healthy? Did they realize when he was much younger that having no friends signals a BIG problem? If so, why wasn’t he treated? Why did never learn how to make friends and fit into society? Did his parents ever recognize that he was deeply troubled? Isn’t one of the obligations of a parent to raise children who can function in society? It would appear that Adam never learned how to function in society. A personality disorder doesn’t come out the blue. It takes years to establish, years when he could have been helped and could have learned how to function with people.
I realize many young people live at home in their 20′s. Most work or go to school. Did Adam do either? But my point in his living at home was that his family would be able to recognize that he needed help because he was right there in their home!
Yes, I do believe that parents have an obligation to commit their children if they deeply troubled like this man, like the shooter in Colorado, like the man who shot Gaby Giffords, like the Tech shooter, like Ted Kusenski. In every instance, the parents knew that their sons were disturbed and yet they made no moves to have them committed. Of course our laws no longer allow mental health facilities to keep them more than 72 hours after a commitment. They have a catch and release program. THAT needs to be changed.
So, anonymous, you want to restrict gun use and restrict violence in movies, games, television, books, music, etc? I don’t think anyone in America glorifies violence. But you obviously have a different opinion.
Thank you, Doug Brown.
You could have made the same description about me as a teenager 35 years ago. My parents and teachers had me as a moody quiet kid who would grow out of it. I remember on a couple of occasions having a deep and very real rage about some perceived injustice which went on a smashed up phone booth and a shop window. I was like that for a couple of years and then I wasn’t anymore. But there is no way you should have ever put a gun anywhere near teenage me. Since i now operate as a fully functioning human being I assume lots of people go through the same thing at some point in their lives . The answer is keep the guns away from them.
Yes, many teens have a bad year or two. That’s not the same as a kid who has never been able to socialize, never fit into his peer group, never had friends, and never able to function in society. It’s a parent’s responsibility to raise children who are able to function in the society that they live in. It’s completely impracticable, illegal, and impossible, to remove all guns from our society. However, it’s not impractical, illegal, or impossible, to get these kids on the extreme the help that they need to function in society.
Mental illness is an illness that for whatever societal reasons is not treated like an illness, but condemned as “weird” “strange” “evil” etc. The young man had a break with reality and no one could have predicted if or when a break with reality might happen. Saying this illness is not impossible to “cure” it and making it the parents’ fault is like saying parents with a terminally ill child suffering from brain cancer should have gotten better treatment for their child and cured him. Sometimes, parents do everything they can, and it is not enough. From all accounts his mother was good mother, and stayed home to help him. Remember too, that once a child is 18, parents have no right to direct, interfere with, question or oversee that child’s medical treatment, and children with mental illnesses are often not cooperative. Perhaps if a child is diagnosed with a mental illness, the laws should be changed to allow parents automatic rights to oversee and direct treatment even after the child is technically an adult.
I agree that video games are excessively violent, and should not be sold to those under 21. Many of the most popular games today do glorify death/killing as “winning.” To a troubled child who has no friends, video games are an escape and killing is a reward to win… video games numb the mind to killing others…
The child who shot everyone in Connecticut needs compassion as a child who suffered. We do need as a society to do more for mental health… it is difficult to find mental health professionals and health insurance most often does not cover it… very expensive for a child to speak with a psychiatrist twice a week over a period of years…. (that is what is required.) Mental illnesses bankrupt families just like other serious illnesses can. Many families simply cannot afford to pay all the doctors/therapist and medical bills out of pocket… one reason why Tag Greason pushed for the bill in the legislature to require insurance companies to cover children with autism…. I could go on…
I do not think autism was the problem but rather a personality disorder. Approximately 20% of those with schizoid personality disorder (not a mental illness) become schizophrenic (a severe mental illness) and have delusional breaks. By the time a schizoid child is a a teenager it is often too late to change their personality although they can be helped to learn how to cope better with society. Pulling an isolated child out of school is not the answer. Isolating him further develops no additional societal coping skills. Therapy, one-on-one, and in groups, can help when the child is very young. If the people in the neighborhood noticed Adam was odd at age 5, and he never had a friend, THAT’S when he should have gotten help, long before his schizoid personality was fully developed. Personality disorders are not the same as mental illness, which don’t normally develop until late teens/early 20′s, and the can be changed with appropriate, early, intervention. With every one of these shooters, the personality abnormalities were noticed much earlier in their lives. I will grant you that many parents don’t know what to do with these odd (for lack of a better word) children but it is incumbent on parents to find out, to help their child learn how to function in society and to develop friendships. Without that early intervention, he’s handicapped for life, at the least, and on Friday we saw what can happen at the worst.
I agree with you LL. I’ve just read that Lanza was at the school the day before the massacre, and had some sort of “altercation” with 4 of the staff members, one of which was the school psychologist. The psychologist was one of those killed. One of those 4 was not at school that day, and is talking with investigators.
If you look at every one of those that committed these atrocious crimes, there is a common thread among all of them. They were all considered social misfits, from Sun Wi Cho, Jared Loughner, the Colorado theater shooter, the Columbine shooters, and now Lanza. It appears that the parents know without question that things are not normal with their kid, but are loath to admit they produced and/or enabled a defective person. Most parents love their children no matter what they do or who they are, but refuse to truly show love in getting help for the disturbed kid. It has long been considered to be a stigma to have mental health issues, so it has been preferable to deny they exist, or to try to hide them. To accuse someone of being very strange, and not acting in a normal manner is comparable to raising the false flag of racism.
I do agree with those that have raised the issue of violent video games, violent movies, and a media that seems to glorify and expose the gorriest and bloodiest of incidents, to increase their ratings. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in a time when the most violent wasn’t the big box office winners, and wasn’t the expected daily occurance. Since around the 70′s, this new cultural phenomenon has been building and building. The later generations have been hardened to this new onslaught. It is quite disgusting. It has also coincided with the move away from the churches and God. Never thought I’d see the day when Atheists were advertising on the sides of buses, and winning court case after court case to remove everything remotely attached to God and religion.
Now the aggressive progressives will use this tragedy to further their goals of gun control. Don’t kid yourself, gun control has absolutely nothing to do with these violent crimes, but rather is a means of more government control and power over the citizens. Gun control will never stop these types of incidents from happening. When someone has mass murder in mind, they will get guns somewhere from someone. In China a guy killed a number of children with a knife. Are we going to ban knives also? Isn’t Chicago a very strict gun free zone? yet every week there are dozens of shootings and murders with guns. Gee where are they getting the guns when they have been “banned” in that city? The bad guys get the guns and the law abiding citizens get slaughtered. There are statistics that prove that the states with concealed carry have the lowest rate of gun crimes.
Just to make another point LL, not only is the media description of Lanza more than a little misleading, the picture you have posted above does the same injustice. There are other pictures of Lanza where he doesn’t look like the cute little innocent guy he seems to be in this picture. The same was done with the Trayvon Martin media narrative, which showed a picture of him when he was an innocent little 12 year old. George Zimmerman was portrayed as a thug vigilante with the picture they used of him. Of course the media wouldn’t dare have posted Martin’s facebook picture of himself with his middle fingers in the air, and showing his gold grill. There is another case of a runaway kid who had been going down hill for the last few years, his parents didn’t seem to even know what he was up to, until he was suspended from school for the third time in 6 months. Even then he was left to his own devices and got himself into a very bad situation.
im so tired of hearing about people being bullyed killed this person or that person. or a smart honor student went physco….. if people are lame and not popular thats their fault, why blame n kill other people for your lame ass life? seriously killing innocent children!! im glad he shot himself in the head bc thats what he deserved. lame ass people do shit just for attention its pathetic
“im so tired of hearing about people being bullyed killed this person or that person. or a smart honor student went physco….. if people are lame and not popular thats their fault, why blame n kill other people for your lame ass life? seriously killing innocent children!! im glad he shot himself in the head bc thats what he deserved. lame ass people do shit just for attention its pathetic”
Gee, what an insightful comment. Lends further credence to the saying, “intelligence is a handicap because most people are stupid.”
http://www.cchrint.org/2012/07/20/the-aurora-colorado-tragedy-another-senseless-shooting-another-psychotropic-drug/
“A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbor in Newtown, Conn., recalled him, adding that he was on medication.” from Wpost
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/adam-lanza-is-recalled-as-a-rambunctious-kid-with-family-problems/2012/12/14/795ad0fe-4641-11e2-8e70-e1993528222d_story.html?hpid=z2
Another article that says he had a personality disorder and many people, including his mother, were aware of it. Of course only a very small percentage of those with schizoid personality disorder, or any disorder, become violent. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/gunman-computers-may-key-connecticut-school-shooting-investigation-174438304.html
Pinecone, yes people will be screaming for gun control but that’s the simple solution for simple minds. Dealing with the mental health issues is more important and much more difficult.
This whole story stinks to high heaven. I think this is Fast and Furious II.
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