Nancy Lanza's life seems to have come straight out of the radical talk-show, Savage-Hannity, World Net Daily world. The mother of the shooter was seen by neighbors as friendly and pleasant, but no one was allowed into her well-armed home.
How many guns Nancy had is not clear, though authorities say several were registered to her, including the ones used in the massacre.Her former sister-in law, Marsha Lanza, told the Chicago Sun-Times outside her home in Crystal Lake, Ill., that Nancy Lanza wanted guns for protection. “She prepared for the worst,” Marsha Lanza told the newspaper. “I didn’t know that they [the guns] would be used on her.”
Members of Nancy Lanza’s regular neighborhood dice game never got inside her home, either — not in 15 years of regular games. Rhonda Collens, a frequent player in the game, said that while the group’s weekly get-togethers moved from house to house, Nancy Lanza’s was always skipped. ...WaPo
Her older son lived and worked at some distance. Adam, the shooter, lived at home.
Adam, at 20, was born not long after the rash of "spree shootings" began in the middle of the Reagan presidency. Before that, there were much longer intervals between incidents in which young or youngish white man plus gun went over the edge and killed whole groups of innocents -- only two in our history before 1984 when James Oliver Huberty, probably the oldest of the bunch at 41, walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro and killed 21 people. "I'm going hunting," he said. "Hunting humans."
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Chris Cillizza thinks -- or maybe just hopes -- that this time things may be different.
The simple truth, at least according to this poll data, is that the increasing tendency in the wake of shootings like the one in Connecticut is to chalk it up to a troubled person and move on. While the death of so many children could certainly change this equation, the data available suggests that pushing for changes in gun laws following Newtown might not be met with the sort of reception you might think. ...WaPo
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And a Texas (surprise!) member of Congress thinks everything woulda been just fine had the principal kept an M-4 in her office.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, says he wishes Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the Sandy Hook Elementary School, was armed with an M-4 assault rifle when she confronted Adam Lanza, the shooter who killed 20 children.
“I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” ...The Hill
