We will probably never know if Adam Lanza achieved his goal, regardless of what he thought it was, on the day he took so many lives in Newtown, CT. His motives died with him. Police and media reports suggest that he broke their computers, thereby destroying any forensic evidence that his writings, photos, or web stories may have provided. His murdered mother cannot offer us any information and his father, brother and other relatives do not speak much, and who can blame them? How or why do you defend the actions of a monster, who was related to you by blood?
But whatever his plan, he managed to create years of pain in a matter of minutes. If your rampage plan took weeks or months to come to fruition, then its brief and bloody end happened in mere moments. Let’s get inside his head and look at the impact of his actions. Whether you intended these results or not, here is a hard list of what you have accomplished:
• Using a premeditated plan, he engaged in mass murder, using high-powered weapons, against defenseless, unarmed and soft targets. It took as many lives as a terrorist group would, using a bomb.
• The media response was huge, international, instantaneous, obsessive, and guaranteed to create a storm of discussions about gun ownership, gun sales and control, multi-round assault weapons, and gun killings as one. such a common part of American culture.
• The moment, around the holidays, created the maximum social impact. What horrible connection to the Christmas season, a supposed time of peace?
• Raises the unsolvable question of why. His suicide postpones all answers about his motives, forever.
• It revealed the inherent and terribly irreparable vulnerability of our most precious population, in the very place where they spend so many hours away from their families. Schools are supposed to be safe zones, where we leave our children in the hands of trained and selected professionals. He showed us how we can’t easily protect an elementary school from a 20-year-old bad boy.
• He moved rapidly through the Q-Rating spectrum, going from absolute nobody to infamous, bypassing the famous, in less than two hours. (Lady Gaga is famous; Lanza is infamous).
• He took revenge on his mother, society, or other students who may have bullied, mocked, threatened, or worse, ignored him. Think about how every classmate who ever insulted this boy feels, or every girl who didn’t reply, “Was it me? Did I send him over the edge?”
• Did you go the way of the copycat and link your actions to beating Virginia Tech’s Cho, the Columbine killers, or the Colorado theater shooter? He should have said, “How much worse do I have to be to get over them?”
• It is not an accident that you destroyed your computers, knowing that forensic personnel would search for every site visit, social media post, newspaper, blog, or electronic denouncement.
• This event ruins Christmas for decades in Newtown. Any anniversary or commemoration close to the shooting date will come among the gifts, wreaths, and trees in a flock.
• Ruined the families of all murdered victims. All parents of a dead child will say what all parents say, sobbing, when they bury a child: “I was not supposed to survive my child.”
• Created many damaged survivors, with potential PTSD problems, trouble trusting adults, and nightmares that will always seem so real. Some will find it difficult to separate going to a school campus (middle, high school, college) from a place where death occurs. (Several of the Columbine survivors earned college degrees online, making it impossible for them to return to a classroom.)
• As a former police officer, I fear PTSD issues for Newtown first responders, including the real possibility of post-event suicides by the “stronger”. More policemen commit suicide each year and then are killed by thieves. Some police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and perhaps even members of the coroner’s office staff who came to the scene will leave. Hopefully they get help with what they had to do.
The media is obsessed with motive in these cases. This is not helpful. We need to focus our efforts on disrupting the opportunity. It will require a compelling combination of changes in the availability of our mental health services; bans on assault weapons and large capacity magazines; more school safety devices and plans; and threat assessment and management processes. After another mass murder incident that tears the national fabric, Adam Lanza may have done enough to initiate these changes.