Image by Kateleen Foy from Getty Images
On the morning of December 14, 2012, a 20 year old gunman carried out one of the deadliest mass shootings committed by a single perpetrator in American history. After murdering his mother, he drove to his former elementary school where he fired 154 rounds, killing 20 first grade students and six staff members before taking his own life in under five minutes. His name was Adam Lanza.
Despite how well documented both the Sandy Hook massacre and Adam Lanza’s life are, the question of what drove him to commit such a horrific act remains largely unanswered. Lanza himself certainly didn’t make it easy for us to work out his motivation, destroying a hard drive that likely contained many online clues and leaving no suicide note behind. Still, that hasn’t stopped specialists from trying.
So let’s unpack the potential motivations of Adam Lanza. But first, some context.
Adam Lanza grew up in Newtown, Connecticut, where Sandy Hook Elementary School was located and where he would attend school from first through fifth grade. He experienced several difficulties both in and out of school during these early years.
For starters, he had a significant delay in the development of his articulation and speech. This meant that he had difficulty with both forming the sounds to create words and translating thoughts from his head into audible speech. Because of this, Lanza found it hard to fully participate in school and required an Individualized Education Plan for several years. Apart from his poverty of speech, Adam also struggled working in groups, experienced severe temper tantrums, displayed repetitive behaviors, and was extremely sensitive to sound, lights, and texture.
All of these challenges left Lanza isolated from peers throughout his elementary school years. And so, many were surprised to have discovered a book Adam Lanza and a classmate wrote together in their fifth grade year: The Big Book of Granny.
The reasoning behind the creation of The Big Book of Granny, while not confirmed, is widely accepted to have been a school project. The book is impressively complex for two 10 year old boys to have written but also extremely disturbing in content. It centers around the character “Granny” and her grandson who take delight in torturing and killing young kids. This brings us to our first potential answer to the question: “why kill kids rather than adults?”
Through The Big Book of Granny, along with several other reportedly disturbing essays he had written during his time in school, Adam Lanza shows an early obsession with harming and murdering children. Therefore, it’s not too far of a leap to say that, if he were to kill anyone, it would likely be children.
Besides his preoccupation of violence towards kids, the idea of “revenge” against the children of his former elementary school specifically has been brought up. However there’s very little evidence to support this claim. When asked, his past teachers were unable to identify any instances where Lanza was ever bullied in school and his father claims Adam’s years at Sandy Hook were the best in his life.
So now we’ve established Adam Lanza as a slightly alienated character with an infatuation concerning violence towards kids. Importantly though, Lanza is neither deeply depressed nor completely isolated yet. That changes over the next few years.
As Adam Lanza begins middle school, noticeable shifts occur in his mood and behavior. The large transition to middle school, with constantly changing classrooms and crowded hallways, causes heightened anxiety in Lanza, forcing him to relocate to a smaller school for a year. Besides general increased anxiousness, Lanza’s repetitive behaviors worsen, he falls behind in school, and his weight drops to dangerously low levels. These developments compel Adam’s mother to bring him to a hospital for an evaluation where a doctor gives him the diagnoses of Asperger’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder along with a note allowing Lanza to be removed from middle school.
Adam Lanza eventually reenters education when high school begins, though this doesn’t last long. By the middle of sophomore year, Lanza had dropped most of his classes and effectively ended his high school education before junior year. Although his time in high school is over, Adam takes several classes at Western Connecticut State University until they cease a year later. At this point, Lanza becomes extremely isolated from the rest of the world which ties into his next potential reason for killing children, envy.
It’s possible that Adam Lanza saw himself as a failure in comparison to the happy and hopeful elementary school children he remembered. While they had their whole lives ahead of them and the ability to seize every opportunity, he was paralyzed by interactions with peers, unable to touch doorknobs due to fear of contamination, and his hands were rubbed raw from compulsive overwashing. Because of this, Lanza may have sought to destroy those children who represented both social success and his self-perceived “defectiveness.”
Following termination of his college classes, Lanza became increasingly withdrawn. Even though he still lived with his mother, who continued to be the only constant human presence in his life, he rarely made face to face contact with her. Instead, he spent most of his time online editing Wikipedia articles on mass shootings and writing essays advocating for pedophilia. This troubling detail adds sexual frustration to our list of potential motivations for murdering children.
Assuming Lanza was attracted to children, being unable to act on those desires likely caused intense exasperation and resentment which translated to his violent attack. “The child has all of the control over the relationship,” Lanza wrote. Perhaps, in killing them, Lanza believed he had effectively taken away that power from those children. However, as interesting as this hypothesis is, it’s unlikely to be the case. Lanza clarified several times throughout his works that he was not in fact a pedophile, despite having an intense interest in the subject. Analysts still disagree on whether or not he was telling the truth.
The final possible rationale behind Adam Lanza’s decision to murder children is that he simply saw himself as too weak to adequately take on anyone else. Lanza was severely underweight, weighing 112 pounds at the time of his attack despite being six feet tall. Therefore, it’s easy to understand how he may have seen first graders as the only victim he could confidently win against.
While we’ve covered many potential reasons why Adam Lanza chose to shoot up the elementary school he loved rather than the high school he couldn’t hack or the middle school he feared, we’re still missing the most important explanation: why kill at all?
Something to remember is that Adam Lanza didn’t only kill the children and staff of Sandy Hook but also his mother and himself. It is unlikely that Adam would’ve carried out his attack had he not been planning to commit suicide right after.
So what drove him to suicide? Given everything we’ve learned about him, the answers are pretty apparent. Lanza felt an intense sense of hopelessness about his future that only increased during his final years. He was unable to live a normal life, not due to his neurological challenges, but because he never received proper treatment. With nothing but prolonged misery in sight, he decided that ending his life would be the only escape.
And so, Lanza had a choice to make: leave the world quietly or hurt others first. Unfortunately, as we know, he chose the latter.
While the rationales covered above for his decision to kill children serve as their own independent reasons for wanting to kill in general, power appears to be the overall most likely drive for murder.
Adam Lanza was both physically weak and emotionally vulnerable. He may have seen violence as a method to boost his manhood and was known to have referred to firearms as “the great equalizer.” When he walked into Sandy Hook on the day of the shooting, he held all of the power. It’s possible he wanted to experience what that felt like at least once before he died.
In the end, we’ll never know the true motivations behind Adam Lanza’s attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. All we do know is that Lanza was a deeply troubled individual whose self-destructiveness ultimately ended up hurting the families of Sandy Hook in unimaginable ways. Not only did the Sandy Hook massacre underline the need for greater gun control in the country, it also highlighted the lack of community intervention and knowledge when it comes to mental illness. Now, measures have been put in place to restrict gun purchases and educate the public on suicide prevention to make sure something like this never happens again. The children of America pray it works.
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