NYDN
“She said she would often go target shooting with her kids”
Adam Lanza, the troubled nerd who turned a Connecticut school into a slaughterhouse, learned how to shoot under the watchful eye of his demanding mom Nancy.
“She said she would often go target shooting with her kids,” landscaper Dan Holmes said.
Nancy Lanza wound up being the first of her son’s 27 victims when he used one of her guns to shoot her dead.
Holmes, who often mowed the grass at the Lanza’s sprawling Newtown home, told Reuters the doomed mom was proud of her arsenal and once showed him a “high end rifle” she had just purchased.
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Enough with the demanding bs. What does it even mean? That she expected her kids to do their chores? That b/c her kid had developmental problems she had to be strict? I have no idea what they mean except they appear to be using it as a slur against a party who cannot defend herself.
Blake on December 15, 2012 at 7:05 PM
OK? Plenty of kids go target shooting. The concern should be with WHY he did it, not what he used to do it.
changer1701 on December 15, 2012 at 7:07 PM
It’s deplorable, and yet one more reason to despise our media.
changer1701 on December 15, 2012 at 7:07 PM
How about NOT training someone with mental problems to use a dangerous weapon?
sharrukin on December 15, 2012 at 7:11 PM
Take your kids hunting instead of hunting your kids.
davidk on December 15, 2012 at 7:12 PM
Kids involved in the shooting sports have a crime rate of just about zero. This is a terrible exception.
juliesa on December 15, 2012 at 7:27 PM
No surprise there. I wonder what militia his mother belonged to that required that she own all these guns. It’s great that she was armed to protect America from another British invasion. Too bad her guns were misused. They were supposed to shoot British soldiers.
America is full of Adam Lanzas. And America is full of guns. So, put two and two together and you get mass shootings. In Canada when someone goes crazy, they walk into a school with a hockey stick and start swinging. Or they just kill themselves any old way. But when you got handguns at your disposal, all of a sudden depression and anger can be easily expressed outwardly. And there is a certain satisfaction one gets from aiming and shooting something. Hockey sticks, knifes, baseball bats, not so much.
The second amendment really screwed the US. And it is far too late to do anything about it now. The irony is, if you tried to take the guns away by law, you would have thousands of more mass shootings, except it would be the police and ATF getting shot.
keep the change on December 15, 2012 at 8:09 PM
14 dead, 14 wounded. They play some pretty rough hockey up there!
École Polytechnique massacre
sharrukin on December 15, 2012 at 8:15 PM
I read she spent the better part of the last year or more taking care of Adam. I’m thinking maybe he resented her spending time away from him with her substitute teaching, and blamed the school and children for it. After an argument over it, in a fit of jealous rage, he killed her, then set out to kill off the people who had taken her time from him.
Just a wild guess.
petefrt on December 15, 2012 at 8:18 PM
I’d knew someone would try that one. That was 23 years ago. How many mass shootings has the US had since that time? America seems to have one every month.
Even as a per capita rate, the homicide rate in Canada is one third that of the US. We have no second amendment. And yet, we aren’t living under some oppression fascist government – as per the gun nut theory. In many respects, Canada is more conservative and more free than the US. And no second amendment. No gun culture.
keep the change on December 15, 2012 at 8:22 PM
Canada has between 7 and 11 million firearms in Canada and the murder rate is 1.6 while the US white populations murder rate is 1.5.
The leftist stranglehold on the black population has implications, and so does a destroyed family life in that community.
sharrukin on December 15, 2012 at 8:31 PM
How many lives have been saved by firearms? Don’t hear that on the news very much, do you? You know why? Because it’s not news. It happens a LOT.
So your plan to make America better is to turn it into Canada?
You do realize Canada is the way it is because it’s fortunate enough to have America as it’s next door neighbor, right?
If not for us, Canada and everyone else would be speaking in German and doing Heil Hitlers on a daily basis. Our freedoms are what make us so great. They are what allows every other parasite nation to not spend on their national defense and go socialist in their domestic policy.
So enough of this crap of trying to compare nations that are not alike in any term other than they have a common language.
ButterflyDragon on December 15, 2012 at 8:31 PM
All information so far, when you connect the facts about the mom, is she didn’t think the shooter’s problems were as bad as the school did.
His high school apparently felt he needed something more, so her response was to pull him out and home-school.
Then, he got worse. And her response was to sit on him at home.
The mom was delusional, borderline paranoid. I knew that when I read she initiated the divorce, when the father didn’t want it to happen.
I know it’s a tough pill to swallow on HA, but this suburban, gun-owning, home-schooling, mother of two, lit the fuse.
Anyone notice how we haven’t heard a thing about the shooter’s doctors?
Yet, with Loughner and Holmes, we had the outline of that info within 24 hours.
So what does that say about the Lanza’s?
That, more than likely, his mom had an early diagnosis of autism, the school said it something else, and she refused to look into it any further.
He was misdiagnosed. He was schizophrenic, and her isolation technique only drove him farther into uncontrollable madness.
Because what exactly is his motivation to kill her and then the school? Norman Bates?
If he wanted her attention all the time, he wouldn’t have killed her. She had already “left” working for the schools some time before, if she did at all.
Like Loughner, schizo’s make insane connections between places and people.
We don’t know if he actually saw the school as an elementary school. He might have assumed it was his high school. He might have thought he was still in elementary school.
The fact that he didn’t drive from Jersey to Newtown, but just a very short distance, fits the schizo profile. None of these guys can travel great mileage because they’re not lucid enough to remember complicated directions without getting into an accident.
The whole family is responsible. The brother for just bailing on everyone. The dad for not keeping direct supervision, or calling services on her decisions. He thought he could paper the situation over with money.
The kid was a techie. His laptop is going to be a trove of insanity.
Once that gets out, the “ban all guns” argument is going to fade hard. Obama will put something in play, but as even CNN and Time, of all places, have already had experts put forth, gun banishment could not have prevented this.
Instead of being a shooter, we would be reading about the arsonist, the bomb maker, the school-as-gas-chamber. This guy, like Holmes, was smart enough to pull off anything outside heavy weapons. Most likely, he would have made a suicide carbomb, filled with poison gas, and killed everyone.
budfox on December 15, 2012 at 8:56 PM
When the shooting happened, I guessed this was another Columbine style performance. The shooter would be relatively affluent, wussy (not fitting in with average athletic style boys), a loner, frail, pale, and hiding in some fantasy realm. Filled with resentments for not fitting into the world unto which the shooter is born, the grudge grows, the infantile ‘I will show them’ attitude builds over the years over perceived injustice.
This shooter staged a performance, including fantasy dress, and the coward headed for the weakest most helpless victims, tiny little kids whom he probably already envied for fitting in.
These are usually not kids who are whacked by drunken low income daddies, but kids who already have a screw loose, but whose parents will keep them well fed, well clothed, and while disappointed in the kid for not being a winner, will cover for them until they hit the breaking point.
Look how so many tip toe around what they saw. Only the parents can make the move to stop what is developing, and they have to do it before the teens, when schizophrenia and other sociopathic malfunctions begin to be expressed and the offspring has gained enough physical and mental powers to do a lot of damage.
Not. It is more conformist
Not. It is more controlled
True
Canada can keep Canada, which suits Canadians
I will keep my 2nd amendment, which keeps me free
entagor on December 15, 2012 at 9:07 PM
It’s now being reported that the people at the school didn’t know her.
She wasn’t a substitute or aide or anything.
Same from the Superintendent of Schools (or school board head?).
Solaratov on December 15, 2012 at 9:15 PM
Tell ya what, lil fella…you take care of Canada and let Americans take care of America.
And, if you’re too scared of all the “violence” in America…go the England for your vacation. Honest people there can’t have guns…so it must be totally safe.
Solaratov on December 15, 2012 at 9:20 PM
Alright keep the change, where does this “gun culture” come from?
I’ll give you a clue: not from guns.
The media, the movies, and the video entertainment industry created and promote gun culture every day. The very same media that is calling for gun bans is the same media that shows violence and sex filled programs every night, and has done so for decades. MTV and its spinoffs are thug culture training camps. Sure, there are other factors: the lack of mental health institutions, a prescription drug addled generation of school children, bad parenting, etc.
But intelligent people realize there are apparent reasons for events and there are the real underlying causes. The problem we face is serious enough to warrant some honest introspection and a cure rather than the knee jerk reaction of the first obvious solution that may not be in the best interests of the country or its citizens.
Xavier on December 15, 2012 at 9:20 PM
Please. If a single person in the US had their life saved because another citizen had a gun, we are the first to hear about it on hotair.com. lol. What we don’t hear about are the thousands of domestic shootings every year. They are just too common.
For every intruder shot with a gun, there are 100 domestic homicides using guns. And this doesn’t even talk about all the criminals who steal guns from houses. Nor does it take into consideration the mass shootings.
Even if a million children were murdered with guns every year, the gun crowd would say that’s a shame, but don’t touch my gun!
Guns don’t make America great. And certainly not the second amendment. It is the first amendment and fourth amendments that matter. And, please, don’t say that if you don’t have your guns, you won’t have the rest. We live in a free, prosperous, and lower-taxed country in Canada, with a conservative prime minister, not some left wing community organizer, so we are doing pretty good without the second amendment.
In the end, the argument for the second amendment is that the government is some big boogeyman who is out to get you, and as soon as you drop your weapons, he’ll pounce. That is what you call paranoid delusions. The whole black helicopter – 9/11 was in inside job – the UN is plotting to take over – the Jews are behind it – FEMA has camps set up ready to go – remember ruby ridge!
It’s a mental illness.
keep the change on December 15, 2012 at 9:32 PM
You are wrong. Dead wrong. Perhaps you should spend some time in police station. Talk to some of the cops.
You want to know what the most common denominator is in homicides? Take a guess. It’s alcohol. Perhaps we should ban alcohol?
ButterflyDragon on December 15, 2012 at 9:49 PM
My wild guess: He shot her out of a jealousy, akin to a man’s jealousy over his lover’s infidelity (Oedipus complex). Dependent on her, he loves her, but he hates her betrayal of him so much that he kills her. Then goes on to kill those he thinks have caused it.
How long ago did she “leave”. I didn’t know that. Would be helpful to know.
petefrt on December 15, 2012 at 9:54 PM
So the Founders were delusional paranoids for including the Second Amendment to protect the citizens from the government? That’s what you’re claiming?
Xavier on December 15, 2012 at 11:03 PM
Are you ever an idiot. You must be in the civil service.
andycanuck on December 16, 2012 at 10:11 AM