Abstract
This essay examines the Sandy Hook school rampage in Newtown Connecticut (Dec. 14, 2012) and the subsequent radical firearms advocacy voiced by the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a traumatic syndrome. I foreground Adam Lanza’s slaughter of 26 primary school children and personnel at the Sandy Hook school because it caused exceptional shock and an impassioned reconsideration of firearms policies: “no story received more public attention” (Pew 2013a, May 7, Gun Homicide Rate Down 49 % Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/) than the debate over gun control that followed 2 months later. In addition, Adam Lanza’s behavior leading up to his rampage shows symptoms of traumatic stress that were mirrored in the positions of radical gun rights advocates.
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Notes
- 1.
At the Yale Child Study Center, in 2006, Dr. Robert A. King concluded that Adam “displayed a profound autism spectrum disorder with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications” (Griffin & Kovner, 2013b, Dec. 28).
- 2.
Alaine Griffin and Josh Kovner, “Lanza’s Psychiatric Treatment Revealed in Documents,” Hartford Courant, Dec. 28, 2013. Adam’s father suspected that Adam’s Asperger’s could be masking schizophrenia (Solomon, 2014, p. 40), which might accord with a symptom of schizophrenia described by Louis Sass: hyperrationality and an anxious preoccupation with the core or ground of identity. See “Introspection, Schizophrenia, and the Fragmentation of the Self,” in Representations 19 (Summer 1987).
- 3.
Perpetrators of “autogenic” rampages, says P. E., Mullen, “tend to share common social and psychological disabilities. They are isolates , often bullied in childhood, who have rarely established themselves in effective work roles as adults. They have personalities marked by suspiciousness, obsessional traits, and grandiosity. They often harbor persecutory beliefs, which may occasionally verge on the delusional. The autogenic massacre is essentially murder suicide, in which the perpetrators intend first to kill as many people as they can and then kill themselves” (Mullen, 2004, p. 311). Cf. Katherine S. Newman, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (also 2004), which emphasizes social forces leading to isolation and infamy.
- 4.
In her e-mail exchanges with Marvin LaFontaine, Nancy Lanza humorously (?) bragged that her Green Beret brother had taught her lethal self-defense moves. See “Nancy Lanza in her own words.” The clinician Adam saw at the Yale Child Study Center described her as “non-compliant” because she refused to continue Adam’s medication (Celexa) and terminated the sessions (Griffin & Kovner, 2013b, Dec. 28).
- 5.
“Matricide is usually committed by overprotected boys—by a son who wishes, as one study puts it, ‘with his desperate act, to free himself from his state of dependency on her, a dependency that he believes has not allowed him to grow up.’ Another study proposes that, in each case examined, ‘the mother-child relationship became unusually intense and conflict-laden,’ while the fathers ‘were uniformly passive and remained relatively uninvolved.’ The state’s attorney’s report says that when Nancy asked Adam whether he would feel sad if anything happened to her, he replied, ‘No.’ A Word document called ‘Selfish,’ which was found on Adam’s computer, gives an explanation of why females are inherently selfish, written while one of them was accommodating him in every possible way” (Solomon, 2014, p. 43).
- 6.
In e-mail correspondence with Marvin LaFontaine (Frontline PBS, 2013), Nancy Lanza alluded to a potentially life-threatening inherited “time bomb” for which she underwent extensive medical tests, and about which she was secretive. It is unclear how this anxiety affected her behavior with her children (“Nancy Lanza in her own words”) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/raising-adam-lanza/nancy-lanza-in-her-own-words/.
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Farrell, K. (2016). Killing the Killer: Rampage and Gun Rights as a Syndrome. In: Ataria, Y., Gurevitz, D., Pedaya, H., Neria, Y. (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_22
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