A week after the unspeakably terrible mass school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut—which left 28 people dead, including 20 children—a private memorial was held for the first victim of shooter Adam Lanza—his mother, 52-year-old Nancy Lanza. The private funeral happened Thursday in New Hampshire, with about two dozen family members and close friends in attendance. “It’s a hard time,” Lanza's brother, James Champion, told the Times. “It’s a very hard time right now.”
There haven't been many memorials to her in Newtown however—according to the Courant, there is only one noticeable tribute to her, a letter written by a friend on yellow paper affixed, screwed and shellacked onto a red piece of wood: "Others now share pain for choices you faced alone; May the blameless among us throw the first stone." When the town bells rang this morning, they did so 26 times, leaving her out.
While family has said goodbye to Nancy Lanza, no one has claimed the body of her son Adam yet. Police had previously said they had "very good evidence" regarding his motives in the mass shooting, but as the week has gone on, it appears more and more that they are no closer to understanding why Adam chose to go to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shoot 26 people that day. "It's pretty thin," an official told the Wall Street Journal about their profile of Lanza.
That source notes detectives have been scrambling to talk to anyone who interacted with Adam in the days before the shooting; but as was reported earlier this week, he was "like a ghost" during recent weeks, and may have been on his own in his home in the immediate days before the shooting. The person he interacted the most with was his mother. who he shot four times in the head with her own .22-caliber rifle, most likely as she slept.
It is on that last point—the role of guns in this story—that Time Magazine's Judith Warner thinks people should be most focused on, and not all the speculation around Adam Lanza's possible Asperger’s Syndrome (or developmental disorder), or the role of violent video games on his psyche:
There are exactly two rock-solid, actionable facts in the Adam Lanza story. He lived in a home filled with firearms. And had he not had access to semi-automatic weapons, he would not have been able to take 26 lives in a matter of minutes. These facts are now being buried in an onslaught of supposition about the effects of video game violence and the need — which I otherwise entirely agree with — for more and better mental health care for America’s kids.
