I’m just going to post this because I don’t know what to make of it yet. Plus there’s been enough bad info floated on this horrible deal already to make anyone cautious that this might not be accurate:
Daily Mail — Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world. Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.‘
‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’ Marsha added that her nephew had been raised by ‘kind, nurturing’ parents’. She said she last seen Adam in June but recalled nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
‘Nancy was a good mother, kind-hearted,’ she added. ‘She wasn’t one to deny reality. She would have sought psychiatric help for her son had she felt he needed it.’
Early reports are the shooter, Adam Lanza, suffered from Aspergers Syndrome and was having difficulty adjusting to his parents’ recent divorce. I have a really bad feeling this lady might turn out to have been influenced by conmen in the militia or apocalypse-any-day-now racket, the kind who are more interested in taking an affluent middle-aged divorcee to the cleaners than in taking her to the gun range.
“I don’t know what to make of it”
Welll I discount anything from the Daily Mail. Out of hand. In its entirety.
I don’t blame you for that! Hence my disclaimer. But my guess is this will turn out to have some truth to it, i.e., that she was a prepper, at least it’s being widely reported in various outlets and includes the real names of friends and neighbors who are providing the info.
I will say this…
The Daily Fail is not a legit source of news. They are often called “The Daily Fail” and have songs dedicated to them such as “Everything Gives you Cancer”. I would take with a pinch of salt.
Stephen,
I’ve had the theory that a lot of these mentally unstable shooters that we’ve seen lately have been influenced by a belief in the “end of the world” nonsense. They were probably thinking that it wouldn’t matter after next week, right?
If you’re not sure of it, the better move is not to post random rumors, especially from the Daily Mail.
This post is a little disappointing.
Beats me. Even if the lady was a bit of a nut I doubt anyone would expect a quiet, shy slightly autistic teenager to bring three guns to an elementary school and massacre a bunch of 5 year old kids for no reason at all. There is no doubt a wingnut racket that subsists by milking every paranoid fear and worry for profit. Whether or not that had any influence on this lady remains to be seen.
Yes. You must be very careful. You wouldn’t want to jump to any unpopular conclusions. It’s unseemly when, for instance, a contributor to Cigar Aficionado blames a junior editor’s lung cancer on tobacco without personally performing another two-year rodent carcinogenesis assay and a thorough response to any and all public comments.
It is unseemly to speculate on an issue that nutbag assholes care about without complete deference to their arbitrarily large standards of evidence for anything related to their pet cause. Even/especially when it appears to be part of a commonly repeated behavior pattern they find themselves motivated to deny.
Form what I understand the idea that he had Asperger’s Syndrome comes form people who knew him in high school and thought he was creepy. i wouldn’t value it too much. Its not generally associated with violence like this.
Citation majorly needed. Early speculation was that he had aspergers, and ONLY because that’s a common scapegoat for these kinds of things. Such speculation came from no psychologists, just “Blame the crazy not the guns!” assholes. Unless of course, you have some new citation to point to where an actual psychologist said that he had aspergers, not someone who thought autistic people were skeery saying “I BET IT WAS THOSE DEFECTIVE MENTALLY ILL FOLKS AGAIN.”
See these two posts on the subject;
http://timetolisten.blogspot.com/2012/07/open-letter-to-media-in-wake-of-aurora.html
http://timetolisten.blogspot.com/2012/12/plea-from-scariest-kid-on-block.html
Particularly the first, with all those delicious *actual facts*.
Realize that when you parrot these things as if they are facts and not hateful speculation, you do real and major harm to real people. Not to mention that as a skeptic, you shouldn’t just be taking that at face value. It has just as much legitimacy as the explanations of “not enough god in the schools” or “violent video games.”
Unless of course, you have some new citation that there were actual reports of Lanza having autism. Then I’ll spin on a goddamned dime and take the whole thing back. Ignoring that mentioning it alone still does harm.
Anyways. If we’re finding out that his mother was a prepper, why is this not a huge red flag for him as well? If she was a prepper, he very well could have been too, and his school shooting could have been linked to that.
“Last night it also emerged that Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement,…..”
Relevancy?
I expect that in due time the reported connection will be analysed or at least confirmed.
If it proves to be an accurate claim, then any relevance will be in the home life atmosphere surely?
These folk are not exactly blessed with balance in reality, and even less moderation in demeanour is a reasonable assumption.
This ridiculous paranoia of end times and firearm stashes, however legal is a just a potent and always toxic blend.
It would be a difficult and fear soaked relationship in house, if the shooter was in any way unstable himself this would not calm the situation, if this kid was indeed Autistic/Asperger Syndrome affected, this would not improve the difficulties he might have had.
But because some early media reports trumpet a shy socially awkward young men does not automatically mean he was in fact either asperger or autistic!
What is known , and little is, there was a woman that had a unhealthy interest in collecting so many deadly fire arms, by accounts these were not pellet guns.
It is presumed she was neither a dealer or collector, if reports confirm this ‘end timer” nonsense then there is a dimension that will be rather harder to parse, let alone solve, then gun control itself, and any legislation that targets ‘end timers’ , because they have a rather fragile mental state for simply in believing such utter tosh, will no doubt bring forward claims of xtian intolerance and suppression.
I doubt anything beyond tinkering with the paperwork of gun control will actually happen, and it is doubtful it will make a difference to the body count in future in these outrages.
It was a matter of time before it happened to victims so young, but beyond root and branch reform of the way the American psyche is on this matter, it will no doubt happen again.
Certainly there will be other atrocities in the future guaranteed, guns are to easy to get hold of, and so many are sloshing around it is not a great problem getting them complete with ammo!
The nonsense about…’Oh they will just use a knife’ is just that …Nonsense… I doubt whether a knife wielder could have murdered 20 kids and then gone after adults without his arm muscles cramping up!
On gun control…the NRA are to well funded and connected, bet they are lobbying representatives and senators already.
The Daily Mail is not the best source, but sometimes they get lucky, although it is best not banking on their accuracy in the least on anything they publish, but there was something not healthy in that house, and it was mega-ugly…it had to do with guns and it had to do with fear, and it had to do with the possibility that mental stability was not a priority there!
eh, I’d take almost anything around this tragedy with a grain of salt.
Doomsday Prepper can have a lot of different meanings, depending on who you talk to.
Not that I ever manage to do this myself, but Ii would think it would be a generally good idea to have anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks worth of potable water, food, and medicine stored away.
I think we have to wait for some information from real journalists about this. The Mail is very unreliable.
Do the New York Times and Daily Telegraph count as legitimate news sources?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/friends-of-gunmans-mother-his-first-victim-recall-her-as-generous.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9749217/Connecticut-school-shooting-Adam-Lanzas-mother-was-preparing-for-disaster.html
I share the scepticism about the Daily Mail.
But if it’s true, then I’m left with the horrible suspicion that Nancy Lanza might have bought all those guns partly to protect the children at the school.
sheila @ 15
Difficult to say…more likely it was her own protection she was paranoid about.
Preppers seem to be rather more self obsessed rather then altruistic.
Two issues, first, if Nancy Lanza was a prepper, why weren’t her guns secured where no one but herself could get at them. Especially the neighbors who she would have to fight to keep her food?
Second, when will Gov Malloy launch an investigation of the state militia to determine why Nancy Lanza did not secure her guns? The state’s well regulated Militia should have taught her to do so to keep the guns from falling into the hands of the state’s enemies.
“She said she last seen Adam in June…” I distrust any news source that can’t conjugate verbs properly.
“Doomsday prepper” can mean all sorts of things, sensible or extreme, and it dpends a lot on who is doing the self/ identification.
If the murderer had some form of autism, it should be mentioned because it could have been a factor and it seems likely was. IMO, the attempts that have been made to claim that autistics kids should be viewed as “normal” (and yes, there is a normal) can have a bad effect e.g. allowing their parents to deny that their child needs help that they, the parents, cannot give.
In addition to the above criticisms, at least give the woman the benefit of the doubt of being a crazy prepper of her own volition. Would you have said the same if she were a male affluent middle-aged divorcee?
hexidecima @ 19
That is a bold statement!
So if Autistic pose such a viable threat to the world…as you seem to infer…how come it has never happened before?
@19 Whether or not the shooter had autism is not a factor. We’re not more violent than other people. Please stop.
http://autisticadvocacy.org/2012/12/asan-statement-on-media-reports-regarding-newtown-ct-shooting/
http://www.emilywillinghamphd.com/
Is there any report on her or her son’s religion? Apocalyptic religion often goes with these survivalist preparations.
There were quite a few ‘he was an atheist’ messages floating around after the shootings, based on nothing whatsoever as far as I could tell.