An Infamy Shared...

By her own account, Nancy Lanza was the mother of a disturbed boy, a painfully shy misfit, an odd piece in the puzzle that is our society.  Did she help him to overcome this?  Did she make every effort to support him in his efforts to find a place for himself among us?  To teach him that ‘different’ is really just another word for ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’?  That he too was somebody who counted?  Did she honestly believe that taking such a boy out of school, isolating him even more, and introducing him to guns and rifles was a reasonable or logical alternative?  A viable means of socialization?  Or was it just another activity a mother and her emotionally unstable son could share?  We may never know what she was thinking.  We may even find out that she did try to get Adam help, did do her utmost to teach him how to cope but there is no denying that, by putting a gun in his hand, Nancy took the grenade that was Adam and pulled out the pin.  He could do nothing other than explode and explode he did.  

There are probably a great many grenades among us and, too often, we don’t even know it.  But Nancy knew!  She knew damn well!  I do not excuse or defend Adam, but it must be acknowledged that it was likely his mother’s actions which were instrumental in flipping the switch.  She aimed the lightning bolt directly at her son and breathed another kind of soul into him.  Carnage ensued.  So who is to blame for it?  The monster or Dr. Frankenstein? Or both?

There are those who advocate that we should have more, not less guns, that arming ourselves to the teeth is the way to go.  Nancy did just that.  She armed herself with the result that Adam, who heretofore had done nothing remotely violent in his life, was handed the ideal tools to become one of the most infamous criminals we have ever known.  

A.J. Aston