Interview with Adam Lanza's father

The articles spins anti-gun in a few spots, but other than that it is an interesting look at the inner dynamics of the Lanza family as told by the father. Some terrible things are just inexplicable. Those who have personally dealt with family members with mental illness will recognize the despair this family experienced for years prior to the shooting. While I can't bring myself to have sympathy for Adam, I do think the mother should be treated as the first real victim.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all

i read this first thing this morning, long read, but well worth it.

I have not yet wrapped mind around whether it makes me feel empathy for them or if i am just astonished at how they did not do enough to help their child. while i understand their need to try and help their son, i dont beleive that either of them took enough steps to get him professional help. The story he wrote in 5th grade, WTF.

He was out of control, the mother was not getting through to him, time for some serious professional help.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

i read this first thing this morning, long read, but well worth it.

I have not yet wrapped mind around whether it makes me feel empathy for them or if i am just astonished at how they did not do enough to help their child. while i understand their need to try and help their son, i dont beleive that either of them took enough steps to get him professional help. The story he wrote in 5th grade, WTF.

He was out of control, the mother was not getting through to him, time for some serious professional help.

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And I thought the story provided evidence that they sought professional help all throughout that kids life. Even with all those professional evaluations, no one saw what was coming.

All tinfoil about what really happened aside, this was fascinating. While I obviously do not condone, or excuse his actions, I can't help but feel sympathy for any tortured soul like his. If he were a rabid sociopath/psychopath who just murdered innocent people conscientiously out of malice, it'd be one thing. But the fact that he had mental defects that were crudely left unattended is sad. This was a guy who at one point couldn't keep it together when reading a textbook because he was so injured, so to speak. It's hard for me to completely disconnect from his humanity and plight, even in light of the atrocities that followed as a result of the symptoms.

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Originally Posted by Blockhead

And I thought the story provided evidence that they sought professional help all throughout that kids life. Even with all those professional evaluations, no one saw what was coming.

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I got the same feeling but to me it seems that more should have been done when he withdrew from everyone. The problem with making that observation is this is a condensed one sided look in to the killers life from someone he disassociated with. We will never get the rest of the story from the horses mouth so we may never know what really happened in the right context. I just hope lessons can be learned from the situation for the mental health community and parents alike.

ETA: Thanks for sharing that story, it was a good read.

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Originally Posted by Blockhead

And I thought the story provided evidence that they sought professional help all throughout that kids life. Even with all those professional evaluations, no one saw what was coming.

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seems to me that they gave up on professional help. mother was hiding the son's actions and mental state from the dad. I think they sought some help and when things did not immediately get better they just tried to handle it. once things really went south it is time for some serious intervention.

I understand that we are on the outside looking in and i have four healthy kids so it is hard to relate to what they went through, but based on the father's own admissions of his son's condition it seems like maybe this kid needed to be locked up. If I came home to that kind of mental and physical behavior every night i dont think i would trying to hide this from the other parent, but really laying it on the table as to what was going on and seeking more help. laying on the bathroom floor crying for 45 minutes is not the sign of a well adjusted teen.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

laying on the bathroom floor crying for 45 minutes is not the sign of a well adjusted teen.

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Well-adjusted teen might be an oxymororn ;) My crying spells were limited to a normal 30 minutes.

yeah al kids have a spell or two, seems like this kind of behavior was a daily thing for years with this kid.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

seems to me that they gave up on professional help. mother was hiding the son's actions and mental state from the dad. I think they sought some help and when things did not immediately get better they just tried to handle it. once things really went south it is time for some serious intervention.

I understand that we are on the outside looking in and i have four healthy kids so it is hard to relate to what they went through, but based on the father's own admissions of his son's condition it seems like maybe this kid needed to be locked up. If I came home to that kind of mental and physical behavior every night i dont think i would trying to hide this from the other parent, but really laying it on the table as to what was going on and seeking more help. laying on the bathroom floor crying for 45 minutes is not the sign of a well adjusted teen.

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This is my thoughts too, it appears that they had a lot of professional help for several years but at the end it was lacking.

I see the mom as a victim but not a helpless one and she definitely could have done more. I have mixed feelings on the shooter.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

I understand that we are on the outside looking in

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I suspect that his condition, no matter how severe, didn't seem as extreme to the parents as it would to someone that wasn't around him regularly.

I was in a restaurant this past week and several little angels were being absolute terrors while their parents seemed oblivious to their behavior. The parents, being accustomed to that behavior apparently didn't see it as out of the ordinary but half the restaurant patrons would have probably liked to have seen how rigid a steak knife was when used in a manner not as intended...

Mom was 100% culpable in this matter. She knew damn well her little baby had serious issues and she taught him to shoot and kept firearms in the house.
I'm sorry but if you have someone in the house with serious mental issues keeping firearms in the home is a recipe for a disaster, secured or not.
I feel it was merciful he killed her.

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Originally Posted by BPTactical

I feel it was merciful he killed her.

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Sadly true.

i love my kids too, but honestly you have to be host with yourself when your kid is batshit crazy, time for some serious intervention.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

i love my kids too, but honestly you have to be host with yourself when your kid is batshit crazy, time for some serious intervention.

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Agreed. There are dozens of anecdotes in the article that are cause for serious concern; some of them warranting hospitalization. And yet, mommy dearest just refused to take the steps necessary and instead tried to placate him with security blankets.

From the lenghty read, It sure seems like the kid should have been in an instatution, not living at home. He was beyond bat shit crazy.

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Originally Posted by hatidua

I suspect that his condition, no matter how severe, didn't seem as extreme to the parents as it would to someone that wasn't around him regularly.

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I would agree with that and on top of it i think she only wanted to blame it on asperger's syndrome. A lot of the the behaviors like crying on the bathroom floor and getting overly frustrated with things like school work and him self are standard asperger's traits but as the father explained we are not only hearing about asperger's here. Suddenly not being able to understand his school work should have been a sign of this but what screams there is a problem is how he dissociated with everyone.

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Originally Posted by colorider

From the lenghty read, It sure seems like the kid should have been in an instatution, not living at home. He was beyond bat shit crazy.

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From what I gathered the possibility of him being institutionalized may have very well been the catalyst that caused him to take the actions that he did. Rumour has it that mom was seriously looking into having him commited.

This interview was pretty illuminating. Anonymous Conservative's essay on Sandy Hook makes for an interesting and possibly insightful companion piece.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com...hool-shooting/

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Originally Posted by Justin

This interview was pretty illuminating. Anonymous Conservative's essay on Sandy Hook makes for an interesting and possibly insightful companion piece.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com...hool-shooting/

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It is illuminating.
Great find and thank you.

not sure of the premises that bullying would make them behave... the bullying that occurs today is different than we had when I grew up and you too Bert it used to just end at school now the bully can follow you home through emails etc. when we had a problem with a kid we would go out behind the gym and handle it ourselves. My thought would be that it is the fact that kids are punished severely for working things out themselves that the lack of a simple fistfight behind the gym or after school finally manifests itself in one giant act of aggression.

maybe this kid was not bullied through email maybe the whole bullying thing was not an issue here, but it cetainly was blamed for events like columbine, certain teen suicides. how does this guy explain the school shootings that occured supposedly from bullying.

i do not aggree that bullying this kid to keep him check would have been a good idea.

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Originally Posted by Justin

This interview was pretty illuminating. Anonymous Conservative's essay on Sandy Hook makes for an interesting and possibly insightful companion piece.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com...hool-shooting/

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I think i am truly dumber after reading that link. I have a family member that deals with special needs people and in turn i have helped out over the the years with people that fall within the autism spectrum and there is nothing to fear from them. The author of that link is giving grossly out date and false information to support his hypothesis. The only defective i see in that article is the author himself. He says this is a large problem and we need to control it, well we have 1 in 88 baby's born with asperger's syndrome alone even more with autism and according to him much more with "inferior amygdalae". Lets say its double that at 1 out of 44 then, we have 7,362 members here when are you going to start bulling the 1 out of 44 to make sure they end up normal? They are going to kill someone it only make sense you do not dilly dally and start now.

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not sure of the premises that bullying would make them behave... the bullying that occurs today is different than we had when I grew up and you too

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That part I don't necessarily agree with. No kid, no matter how weird our outlandish, deserves to be bullied. That said, the basic fact of the matter is that kids who are bullied are usually bullied because they are different. Not saying it's right, or fair, but that's the way it is.

I think the most relevant part in AC's blog entry (which, btw, was published in 2012) is his claim that people who lash out violently like this do so because reality fails to live up to their expectations. They're fundamentally incapable of facing reality.

That inability to cope with reality is the thing that stuck out most obviously to me while reading the interview with Peter Lanza. One of the themes throughout the interview was that there was a constant theme of Adam Lanza being completely incapable of dealing with reality; after all, here was a kid that thought he was either going to take a massive college course load or join special forces, despite the fact that he could barely leave his bedroom or tie his shoes.

The major thing that I see reinforcing his delusions were the actions of his mother, who evidently went to great lengths to shelter her son from any situation whatsoever that might cause him mental distress. While the fact that she sheltered him probably made him slightly more tolerable on a day-to-day basis, I have little doubt that it would only cause him to have angry and explosive reactions when faced with situations where his outsized self-image proved to be no actual match for reality. Is it possible that after some time he'd gotten such an over-inflated sense of self esteem that the slightest ding against it would cause him massive amounts of internal grief? Possibly. It certainly strikes me as being a more reasonable explanation than just about any other.

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maybe this kid was not bullied through email maybe the whole bullying thing was not an issue here, but it cetainly was blamed for events like columbine, certain teen suicides.

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The claim that bullying caused Columbine is a straight up fabrication on the part of the mass media, especially in the case of Eric Harris. Harris wasn't bullied. He was actually a highly charismatic example of a textbook psychopath. After all, do you honestly think that some nerdy high school loser would have been able to talk his way into sex with a college-aged woman, and then get her to buy a gun via a straw purchase?

Regarding Columbine, I strongly recommend reading Dave Cullen's book on the incident. He spent the better part of a decade researching it, and there's a lot of information in the book that is illuminating.

http://www.amazon.com/Columbine-Dave.../dp/0446546925

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I have a family member that deals with special needs people and in turn i have helped out over the the years with people that fall within the autism spectrum and there is nothing to fear from them.

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Nothing in the blog post says that we should fear people with autism, so perhaps you shouldn't read so much into the article, but rather actually read what he says.

The bits that I find particularly worthy of attention are where he points out that a culture of that over inflates the self-esteem of people results in people who are incapable of dealing with reality when it turns out that they're not nearly as awesome in real life as they are in their head.

The fact that Lanza's mother evidently coddled him to the point of walking through a room in the manner he demanded, tying his shoes, and enabling his social isolation in order to preserve his self-image would seem to reinforce the central thesis presented in the blog post that I linked to.

Wow, fascinating article/interview. Thanks for posting it up.

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Originally Posted by Rabid

I think i am truly dumber after reading that link. I have a family member that deals with special needs people and in turn i have helped out over the the years with people that fall within the autism spectrum and there is nothing to fear from them. The author of that link is giving grossly out date and false information to support his hypothesis. The only defective i see in that article is the author himself. He says this is a large problem and we need to control it, well we have 1 in 88 baby's born with asperger's syndrome alone even more with autism and according to him much more with "inferior amygdalae". Lets say its double that at 1 out of 44 then, we have 7,362 members here when are you going to start bulling the 1 out of 44 to make sure they end up normal? They are going to kill someone it only make sense you do not dilly dally and start now.

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Come on Rabid, you're better than that ... drop the PC driven overly emotional indignation and go back and read the rest of Anonymous Conservative's site so you can understand the real context of what he's saying (especially about the "inferior amygdala"). Don't shut your mind down just because the author isn't tripping all over himself to claim that "all special needs children are precious little saints that have a lot to teach us so-called normal people."

The simple truth is that Adam Lanza suffered from several mental illnesses and that one or more of these illnesses lead him to murder innocent children. I agree that we must tread lightly when it comes to blaming which specific illness lead him down this path, and we need to be careful not to stigmatize every Asperger's or Autistic child and paint them with the "potential mass murderer" brush. But we do need to honestly look at Lanza and see if there isn't something in his life and condition that we can learn from to prevent this type of thing in the future (or we could just ban guns and violent video games instead).

I'd like to read what Anonymous Conservative thinks about what Lanza's father said.

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Originally Posted by rockhound

not sure of the premises that bullying would make them behave...i do not aggree that bullying this kid to keep him check would have been a good idea.

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My concern about the current wave of "Anti-Bullying" programs is that bullies and bullying are part of the human developmental experience and are much more valuable than we realize.

Its part of the same problem as over use of antibiotics and antibacterial soap. In this well intentioned but misguided effort to protect our children from every slight discomfort we end up stunting the development of their immune systems making them much more susceptible to disease later in life (or causing their bored immune systems to turn against their own body which is where all these damn food allergies come from).

Well bullies are like psychological germs, dealing with them in youth strengthens our minds making us stronger and better able to deal with truly evil adults later in life.

Beating up Scut Farcus will make Ralphie better able to deal with Vladimir Putin.