What Makes an Adam Lanza?

Given the recent Sandy Hooks Elementary School shootings, I wondered about the differences and parallels between mentally disturbed individuals (clear mental health issues) vs. serial killers (brain trauma and/or abuse) vs. terrorists (like suicide bombers).  I am particularly interested in the call for gun control, in this case and cases that are similar in nature.  I am not convinced this is (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) gun control issue.  Maybe Adam would not have killed had he not had immediate access to guns, but would that have deterred him completely or would the thing that snapped inside him act out in other horrific ways?  Read Anne's blog post below - I look forward to your comments.

What Makes an Adam Lanza?

Adam Lanza was not a terrorist in the strict definition of the word: he had no political cause, but he terrorized a community and a nation and committed a heinous crime, reminding many of the Beslan School hostage-taking in which three hundred and thirty innocents were killed.

I've been studying terrorism for ten years–interviewing terrorists, their family members and close associates, and their hostages – including those held in Beslan – and I find there are a lot of parallels between terrorism and mass shooting sprees.  For one, terrorists are made, not born.  The same is true for mass shooters.

In the case of terrorism, I found that there is a "lethal cocktail" of terrorism that takes vulnerable individuals and moves them along the terrorist trajectory to enact violence.  A vulnerable terrorist recruit rarely acts alone; they need a group, an ideology and social support to propel them into violence.  The group equips them, the ideology justifies violently killing civilians and social support makes it more attractive to engage.  The individual acts out of his own pain, which resonates with the other three ingredients.  

Mass shooters, as opposed to terrorists, often do act alone, but let us not deceive ourselves that they are in fact lone actors.  Just like terrorists, there is a group that equips them—it's the local gun store, gun fair, a friend or family member, or any place where they can quickly and easily obtain means to kill– once they have crossed the mental line where killing others becomes acceptable.  And the ideology and social support that justifies mass shootings here in the U.S.–in the demented minds of those who carry them out–is the cultural milieu of violent movies, computer games, even family and cultural socialization that models for troubled young men to refrain from expressing their emotions and asking for help ("big boys don't cry") and glorifies using gun violence as a means to express pain and solve problems. (See the latest action movie, television show or computer game where the hero shoots his way into the arms of the loving girl).  Social support also exists in the instant and overwhelming media attention that mass shooters are guaranteed to get by expressing their painful outrage, despair, or whatever other sick idea they wish to get across through murder. 

Like terrorists, mass shooters are vulnerable individuals and usually highly troubled.  A young man does not pick up a semi-automatic rifle and go into a school, workplace or public gathering and shoot as many people as possible for no reason.  In the case of shooting school-age children, the perpetrator may highly identify with the age of his victims, symbolically killing himself at the age when he suffered sexual abuse or some other violence or humiliation which he has never gotten help with, doesn’t know how to get over, and is now expressing his outrage in killing others. Again we see emotions acted out–versus spoken and worked through –and violence used to try to wipe away pain.  Or he may just be mentally ill and unable to contain or work through upsetting emotions and the gun provides him an outlet. 

Terrorist groups know that when a vulnerable individual is in overwhelming psychic pain it is often not hard to attract him into a suicide mission – he wants to express that pain, will act in behalf of the group and seeks to exit out of this life as what he believes is a "hero" by following the militant jihadi ideology that promises instant access to paradise.

In the case of mass shooting incidents, the lone perpetrators are often not following any terrorist ideology and don’t believe their act will take them instantly to paradise, but they are in deep psychic pain.  Their emotional pain is so overwhelming that they want to express their outrage and despair publicly unleashing a bloodbath that can only result in their death even if they don’t suicide.  They have so little help for dealing with their anguish that it overwhelms any reasonable judgment, and they see death as their only viable exit.  They are in a state of what suicidiologist Edwin Shneidman called “psychache”, which is the biggest predictor of suicide.  But these actors will not simply suicide. They will kill others as they exit life, which is why our first responders now need to know how to act fast to take the suicidal murderer down and hopefully lowering his potential number of victims before he kills himself or suicides in “death by cop”.  In either case the terrorist or the lone shooter is aiming at suicide (the terrorist may be calling it “martyrdom”) and we need to understand that.  His psychic pain is overwhelming and he will express it until he is killed or kills himself – if he is equipped to do so. 

So how do we prevent the next Adam Lanza?

We can tackle the problem from any number of avenues. The fact that in this country, vulnerable individuals have access to semi-automatic weapons at the time when their minds are filled with overwhelming pain and a desire to die—but not without first expressing their outrage, despair and emotional pain in a slaughter of others. The availability of guns makes certain that the "lethal cocktail" of mass shootings continues to exist and operate in our country.  We have to come to grips with finding a balance between our freedoms and the need to protect our children and innocent civilians. And some element of that is likely going to have to be restriction of weapons that can commit carnage in seconds.

We have to do more to try to identify and intervene with troubled youth, giving help to young people who were abused, neglected or otherwise hurt and who are now searching for a way to resolve horrible inner pain without knowing where or how to get help. Truthfully this kind of psychological care is very costly, and at a time of fiscal challenges, it isn’t easy.  But can we do any less when looking at the faces of the children we lost in Connecticut? We can and should provide good mental health interventions that identify and treat troubled youth – but will we? And will everyone that needs it, engage in accepting help? We can’t force troubled young people who have committed no crime into therapy. 

We are also unlikely to do away with violent movies, television shows and computer games that model killing.  But we do have to recognize that our entertainment media is contributing to a violent society and perhaps decreasing the empathy of children who grow up witnessing countless violent acts.  We can and should limit more carefully what we let our children watch and play.  And as consumers we should encourage the entertainment industry to create dramatic action films and games that are fun and engaging but do not glorify death and killing.

And there’s no escaping media that will cover every moment of any mass shooting. So there will always be a subsection of troubled young people who will want to pick up guns to act out their pain. And as long as there are guns easily accessible to them, some of those young people in overwhelming psychic pain will chose guns and mass shootings ending in suicide as their means of expressing outrage and their pathway out of agony.  

We can give teachers guns, put a cop in every school and hope they stop the perpetrators before they shoot our children.  And we can begin to identify, treat and intervene in the lives of abused, neglected and hurt young people to prevent them from becoming violent in the first place.  But for those we miss and who fall through the cracks, we can ensure protection of the general population by creating strong controls on assault weapons.  We can and must stop the next Adam Lanza.

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School.  She is the Author of  Talking to Terrorists: Understanding the Psycho-Social Motivations of Militant Jihadi Terrorists, Mass Hostage Takers, Suicide Bombers & “Martyrs”  For more information and to read additioanl material authored by Anne, please visit her website at Anne Speckhard

 

 

 

Comments

[Mettilda Jacob]

I think, the divorce, the medicines taken by Adam, the don't care attitudes of the society, remarriage of his father, Nancy’s strict nature, Nancy hiding the problems rather than solving it, Nancy not allowing him to join the army, Nancy's intentions to send him for mental treatment and her short vacations leaving him alone in the house, all these together might have led to such a crisis.
It is high time to think about how the family bondage can be made stronger. The parents should be mentally healthy enough to look after the children rather than giving medicines to mentally affected children because of separation of parents.
Please think why so much of children who are affected by Asperger's are there in the society.
Rather than blaming Adam Lanza for doing this, this incident should be an eye opener to think of what is wrong with the present society and how it can be corrected. He was a victim of the society's drawbacks.

Let this incident be a stepping stone for a renovation.
Apply the "Glasnost" (openness) and "Perestroika" (restructuring) applied by Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia when Russia underwent an economic crisis.
Nothing happens without the knowledge of GOD. GOD allowed this to happen for the good of the future generations.
I do not want to blame anybody, but pray that a conscious move to eradicate such incidents in future may be taken by all people around the world including myself.
This can be achieved only by loving each other. Let it start from home, the spouse, the children, the parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and the society. Nothing is impossible for man, if he wants, with the grace of GOD. Let it be revolution, a revolution of love. I have started the revolution. Join me.