More thoughts on Newtown

I’m a little scatterbrained trying to get this post together, so you may have to bear with me if it seems a little disorganized, but there’s a lot more ground I’d like to cover.

First up a little news. We may never know the motive behind why Adam Lanza decided to attack Sandy Hook Elementary. The New York Times is reporting that Adam Lanza had no real connection to the school…

There was “no connection” between Adam Lanza and Sandy Hook Elementary School, a Connecticut State Police spokesman said Monday afternoon. There had been earlier reports that Mr. Lanza had attended the school as a child. It was not immediately clear if “no connection” meant that Mr. Lanza had not attended the school.

Moreover, Nancy Lanza was not nor has ever been a teacher at the school.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Adam Lanza had smashed his computer to bits before the tragedy possibly to thwart the investigation into the shooting…

The damaged evidence raised the possibility that Mr. Lanza’s rampage may have been premeditated and not a result of a spontaneous decision.

Lastly, there is NO TRUTH to the RUMOR that Adam Lanza got into a fight with four teachers at the school the day before the killings…

[Updated at 6:22 p.m. ET] Earlier reports that the suspected shooter, Adam Lanza, had an altercation with four adults at the school on Thursday have been investigated and are not accurate, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation.

Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police noted in a news conference Saturday that he knew of no reports about Lanza being involved in any altercations at the school.

Remember this one kids, it becomes important later.

Now on to the opinion…

NANCY LANZA: I’m usually the first person to jump on the parents of a school shooter if they turned a blind eye to the warning signs. I can’t do that in this case. By all accounts, Nancy Lanza was more involved in her son’s life than most parents that don’t have a special needs child are. She was willing to pull up roots and move to wherever Adam wanted to go to college just to make sure he could get a good start on a new life. So even I was taken aback when I saw some Nancy Lanza hate on the internet today. I’m hoping it’s just from a small and ignorant minority. By all accounts, she was her son’s greatest ally, and she was shot in the face repeatedly for it.

MORE ON GUNS: Something I forgot to mention about arming teachers in yesterday’s post. If you arm all the teachers with firearms then all those guns are nothing more than a shopping list for a potential school shooter. If school shooters can obtain weapons through straw man gun purchases or steal them from their parents lifting one from a teacher would be no hard challenge. Arming teachers would only work in a perfect world and ours is far from perfect.

COPYCATS: I’m not going to post about every loser that has made a threat on Facebook or to their wives or whatever in the wake of Newtown. These are the people who are actually looking for some kind of fame. Unless it was a credible threat I will not be posting about those jackholes here.

BLOGGERS BEING ASSHOLES AND SPREADING MYTHS: Earlier today I was reading an L.A. Times article about Dave Cullen’s book Columbine. In it, it’s mentioned that reporting about Columbine was like playing a game of Telephone. If that’s the case (and it was) the reporting out of Newtown was like playing a game of Crappy Tracfone While Going Through A Tunnel In A Lead Lined Truck. So much misinformation was reported about Newtown and just seems to now being perpetuated by some bloggers. One blogger that I used to have a modicum of respect for is still posting that Lanza was at the school the day before the shootings. The only ‘news’ outlets that are still clinging to that part of the story are British tabloids and gossip blogs. This was also a blogger who laid the blame squarely at the feet of Nancy Lanza without hesitation. Another blogger I used to have respect for said that we need to round up all the ‘Aspies’ and put them in a concentration camp further disseminating a myth that Asperger’s automatically makes you a potential killer. (Please see my mea culpa in the comments.)

Granted there’s no school you have to go to in order to become a blogger but some of us actually take pride in our work and to see hacks like this doing a disservice to everybody makes all of us look bad.

One of my blogging mentors once told me controversial but be yourself. If these bloggers are being controversial for the sake of controversy then they’re just page count whores. If they are being true to themselves, then I feel sorry for them for keeping themselves in such a state of ignorance.