Fear of Being Committed May Have Caused Connecticut Gunman to Snap

By Bob Dillan

The gunman who slaughtered 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school may have snapped because his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility, according to a lifelong resident of the area who was familiar with the killer’s family and several of the victims’ families.

Adam Lanza, 20, targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown after killing his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the school “more than she loved him,” said Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims’ families worship.

“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Flashman told FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”

A senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation confirmed that Lanza’s anger at his mother over plans for “his future mental health treatment” is being looked at as a possible motive for the deadly shooting.

 

“He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry.”

– Joshua Flashman, Newtown resident familiar with Lanza family

 

Flashman was told Nancy Lanza had begun filing paperwork to get conservatorship over her troubled son, but that could not be confirmed because a court official told FoxNews.com such records are sealed. The move would have been necessary for her to gain the legal right to commit an adult to a hospital or psychiatric facility against his will. A competency hearing had not yet been held.

Adam Lanza attended the Sandy Hook School as a boy, according to Flashman, who said Nancy Lanza had volunteered there for several years. Two law enforcement sources said they believed Nancy Lanza had been volunteering with kindergartners at the school. Most of Lanza’s victims were first graders sources believe Nancy Lanza may have worked with last year.

Flashman said Nancy Lanza was also good friends with the school’s principal and psychologist—both of whom were killed in the shooting rampage.

“Adam Lanza believed she cared more for the children than she did for him, and the reason he probably thought this [was the fact that] she was petitioning for conservatorship and wanted to have him committed,” Flashman said. “I could understand how he might perceive that—that his mom loved him less than she loved the kids, loved the school. But she did love him. But he was a troubled kid and she probably just couldn’t take care of him by herself anymore.”

The Washington Post reported that the distraught mother had considered moving with her son to Washington state, where she had found a school she thought could help him. Either way, according to Flashman, Nancy Lanza was at her wit’s end.

A separate neighborhood source also told FoxNews.com that Nancy Lanza had come to the realization she could no longer handle her son alone. She was caring for him full-time, but told friends she needed help. She was planning to have him involuntarily hospitalized, according to the source, who did not know if she had taken formal steps.

Multiple sources told FoxNews.com Adam Lanza suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, and unspecified mental and emotional problems.

Adam Lanza has also been described by those who knew him as highly intelligent, and a spokesman for Western Connecticut State University told The Associated Press he took college classes there when he was 16, earning a 3.26 grade point average and excelling at a computer course.

Alan Diaz, 20, who was friends with Adam Lanza at Newtown High School, said the Lanza he knew was ill-at-ease socially, but not a monster.

“He was a wicked smart kid,” Diaz told FoxNews.com by email. “When I first met him, he wouldn’t even look at you when you tried to talk to him. Over the year I knew him, he became used to me and my other friends, he eventually could have full conversations with us.

“I’ve heard him laugh, he has even comforted me once in a hard time I had,” Diaz said. “A big part of me wishes I never dropped contact with him after he left high school, felt like I could have done something.”

Flashman said nobody will completely understand why Adam did what he did.

“No one can explain Adam Lanza besides God and Adam Lanza, and I don’t even think Adam Lanza could explain Adam Lanza, to be honest with you.”

5 Steps That Will Curb Gun Violence (And 5 Ways They Will Fail)

By Spencer Ackerman

Suspected terrorists can’t fly on planes, but they can buy guns. The feds can track sales of fertilizer, but not semi-automatic rifles. Brick-and-mortar gun dealers perform background checks, but online ones often don’t. These are three of the many odd aspects of the gun trade that are now being reconsidered after the massacre of 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Here are five potential steps that gun owners, gun vendors, manufacturers, law enforcement and legislators might consider to stem mass-casualty gun violence — without shredding the Second Amendment, and without forcing gun owners to give back their weapons. No one measure will eradicate such attacks: Perfect security is an illusion, and one easily used to snatch away people’s liberties. None of the proposed fixes are foolproof. Each of them comes with the potential to seriously backfire. But after Sandy Hook, it’s time to a take a fresh look at the state of America’s firearms market.

Microstamping

Imagine every semi-automatic gun — those that automatically reload after every trigger pull — carried its own unique signature, transferable to every bullet at the point of firing. That’s what happens with an engraving technology called microstamping: Once engraved with a laser during manufacture, the gun’s firing pin imprints a tiny alphanumeric code onto the bullet’s shell casing and the primer used to fire.

Pro: Shell casings are more likely to be left at crime scenes than firearms or fingerprints are. “Stamp” the shell and you’ve added a layer of evidence about a perpetrator for police, one that’s theoretically more exact than ballistics testing. It’s primarily a method to mitigate gun violence after it occurs, but it’s possible microstamping could have some deterrent effect as well.

Con: It’s only a tool for semi-automatics, so it’s irrelevant if you’re reloading, say, your shotgun shells manually. You’d have to mandate microstamping at the point of manufacture for new guns, meaning it’ll be irrelevant for the estimated 310 million guns already in use in the country. It’s theoretically possible to file off the marking on the firearm pin, although practically speaking the engraving is invisible. Finally, the data on the shell casings can only identify the last legal owner of the gun.

Magazine Limitations

Jared Loughner never had to reload when he shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. His Glock carried a 33-round extended magazine; Loughner fired 31 bullets. The U.S. has limited magazine size before: The expired 1994 Assault Weapons Ban banned magazines carrying more than 10 rounds. (.pdf)

Pro: Anytime a shooter has to stop to reload increases the chance that victims could escape; that law enforcement or others can stop an assailant; and, basically, fewer people will die. Robert Wright of The Atlantic goes a step further and proposes a ban on firearms carrying more than six rounds or a detachable magazine, meaning a shooter would have to reload bullet by bullet.

Con: There isn’t strong data correlating restrictions in magazine size with drops in gun crime. As theWashington Post’s Brad Plumer points out, the assault weapons ban exempted about 30 million high-capacity magazines, so studying the impact of the ban is surrounded in statistical noise. A shooter can always carry multiple loaded weapons.

Equalizing Online and Offline Gun Sales

If you want a gun to commit a crime, you should buy one over the internet. Federally licensed gun dealers need to conduct background checks on prospective buyers. But online, you can resell your guns in a burgeoning secondary market, on websites like ArmsList, without being a licensed dealer, and without background checks. While online vendors are supposed to ship their guns to a federally licensed dealer who’ll perform the background check, a 2011 New York City investigation found that’snot always the case in practice. (.pdf) The rules vary site to site, but many sites take the eBay or Craigslist approach of staying hands-off after visitors sign a term-of-service agreement. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, bought his guns online; so did the Aurora shooter.

Pro: You’ll shut down an easy path for people to acquire dangerous weapons without answering questions. The changes to online gun marketplaces, the New York City investigation suggested, are feasible without shutting down the resale markets themselves: either authorized gun dealers or law enforcement would perform the background checks, or the sellers would have to verify a buyer’s valid gun permit — something the investigation judged to be “relatively easy.”

Con: It’ll require a lot of enforcement. Imagine having a regulator reviewing every eBay auction. Since online gun stores are basically connector points between consumer and vendor, it’s easy to imagine illicit transactions moving to a different forum — i.e., if you reach me over ArmsList and offer me big money for one of my guns fast, maybe I’d rather do business with you in a less conspicuous forum, like a vacant lot.

Put Gun Registries in Terrorism Databases

If you’re a suspected terrorist, you’ll set off all kinds of alarm bells if you try to buy the precursor materials for a bomb. But if you going on a firearms shopping spree, you’re in the clear, since the government can’t legally maintain a database of gun owners. In other words, “there is no basis to automatically prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives because they appear on the terrorist watchlist,” a 2011 Government Accountability Office report found. (.pdf) Read that again: suspected terrorists can buy all the guns they want. Perhaps that shouldn’t be so.

Pro: The last people who should have guns are suspected terrorists, right? At the very least, law enforcement needs tools to be able to track the prospective weapons purchases of people they’re monitoring out of fear they’ll commit an act of terrorism, especially since it’s so easy to buy guns.

Con: The U.S. government often mislabels ordinary citizens as terrorists-in-training — which makes terror watchlists awfully problematic. They contain the names of people who’ve never committed and won’t commit any crime, sometimes because of incorrect transliterations of their names, as a Department of Homeland Security study found. (.pdf) An 8-year-old boy was once on the government’s “selectee” list for extra screening at airports. And once you’ve been placed on a watchlist like the “no-fly” list, there’s no obvious mechanism for getting off it: The government doesn’t have to tell you you’re on it.

Cash for Guns

This one isn’t a technological solution at all; it’s an economic one. Police departments across the country offer cash for guns. Australia has experience with it at the national level: After a mass shooting in 1996, it bought back nearly a fifth of all shotguns, handguns and rifles in private use, some 600,000 of them.

Pro: There hasn’t been a mass casualty incident in Australia since 1996. An Australian study that theWashington Post’s Dylan Matthews found estimates that the law led to a 59 percent decline in the firearm homicide rate and a 79 percent decline in the firearm suicide rate.

Con: It’ll be expensive. A recent congressional study found that the U.S. has over 300 millionhandguns, rifles and shotguns, which is about one weapon per American. That shows a robust demand for firearms in the United States that may either render buyback programs marginal or risk stressing state and federal budgets.

Again, none of this is to say that any of these measures, individually or in concert, would necessarily prevent another Sandy Hook. There will always be psychopaths who figure out ways to kill people. But it is to say that there are gun-control options that either make it harder to pull off a mass-casualty shooting or can mitigate its effects, short of the unrealistic demand that Americans surrender their hundreds of millions of guns. If we’re willing to discuss them, that is.