Court Case Of Adam Lanz Mass Murderers

[a] Adam Lanza. [b] Mass murderer (Adler 235). [c] Adam Lanza is considered a mass murderer because he killed multiple individuals in one location during a short, continuous time period (Adler 235). He used violence by shooting innocent children with guns as an outlet for his built up anger toward society.

2. The crime Adam Lanza committed was mass murder by means of a school shooting. He shot and killed twenty first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. He killed them all in the same time period and same location. Prior to the shooting at Sandy Hook, he also shot his mother at her home and in the end, he turned the gun on himself and took his own life (Shultz 2013). The shooting at

[a] No formal punishment was ever able to be inflicted on Adam Lanza because once he saw law enforcement personnel he committed suicide with a handgun (Melia 2013). [b] Again, Lanza didn’t receive any informal punishments for shooting and killing all these people because he killed himself before any rightful punishment could be inflicted. During informal sanctions, ridicule can cause a straying towards norms. Prior to committing mass murder, students suggested that Lanza may have been bullied but there was never any confirmation and many people generally thought he was a weird kid (Melia 2013).

4. Based on everything learned about Lanza, I would use the social control theory to explain why he committed the shootings in Connecticut. Social control theory proposes that influences of family and school, norms, and beliefs all play a part in encouraging individuals not to break the law. Your relationships with certain people can encourage you to do right and discourage you from doing wrong and social control theory focuses on how deviants are or are not attached to common value systems (Adler

All of the things I previously mentioned contribute in this particular case because Lanza isolated himself from everyone, including his mother who seemed to discard all red flags even when it was clear that something was not right about her son. He didn't have a very good relationship with his mother and then his parents had divorced in 2008 with his father relocating to another part of Connecticut (Andersen 2014). Eventually, Lanza became estranged from both his father and his older brother and had not talked to them since 2010. He isolated himself from friends as well and didn’t like to participate in groups at school. He had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and was believed to have a personality disorder. By the age of ten, he was already troubled with feelings of hate and in fifth grade, he wrote a book that included tales of children being slaughtered. He eventually became fascinated with mass killings as he had a number of books and articles on them and although all of these contribute to being negative influences on his life, his motive as to why he targeted this elementary school or what lead him to this is still unclear (Melia