I'm going to go with my hunch that it was the Internet and violent video games and culture that poisoned Adam Lanza's soul -- and of course, I'm aware that he may have been mentally ill. Most news stories describe Lanza as "autistic," by which they mean he was "on the autism spectrum," and in his case, "high functioning," as he graduated from high school three years early. (Say, what a bad idea to have 13-year-olds who are already socially maladjusted and have them graduate school early and then not have a viable place to put them.)
He's also described as having "Aspergers," and you can be sure that even the most aggressive and hateful Aspies we know in Second Life and real life (and I've had really extensive exposure to some of the nastiest) are going to insist that their condition does not make them prone to mass murder. And they might be right. It might be other things in combination with this condition that do that, like insanity, drugs, or even violent video games.
Thinking about this person and his life from what we know online, which isn't much, and learning that he was not talkative in school, had no obvious school or after-school activities except the technology club, didn't even get a yearbook picture, etc. I thought to myself: well, then he lives his life online.
That means that somewhere online, is Adam Lanza's avatar or avatars or online persona.
No, he's not "Adamo Lanza" related to Second Life -- that person isn't American, is obviously much older, and even allowing for Lanza's brilliance, couldn't have been writing at the age of 12 or 13 in 2004 and 2006 sophisticated articles about Second Life's banking system -- that's clearly someone else.
And he wouldn't use his own name if he were a shy and awkward Aspie. He would have a nick or an avatar name. So somewhere, there is someone who fits this profile -- who has maybe been missing since Friday.
Once such forum where the denizens believe that a member named "5.56 SS109" could be Adam Lanza is zoklet. The name is apparently reference to guns although the wits on this forum have dubbed it "his penis size".
I never heard of Zoklet and it's a little hard to figure out what it is because it's an unsafe site and you have to keep risking malware and harassment to visit it -- and I just don't play with that. But from what I gather, it's a site where people cynically discuss mass murder and public suicides among many other topics like the Trayvon case. So that makes it like lots of discussion forums in the Metaverse, I realize, but this one seems a little more interested in guns and mass shootings than most.
If you don't mind malware risks, see here, here, and try a Google cache here.
Some people on this forum are convinced 5.56 fits the profile of Adam Lanza, and despite being a board mod who vigorously banned others, he is missing now. He liked guns and had other features that they seem to think "fits". They could be wildly wrong, of course. "In the hall of mirrors that is the Interwebs, we may never know," as Urizenus Sklar has put it. One of the forum participants who was banned by this board mod pleaded innocence; he had discussed the fact that many mass shooters committed suicide after killing others, and 5.56 apparently angrily denied this fact and cited counter evidence. They discussed the case of the man who shot 7 people at a workplace.
Another incident involved a Columbian girl who killed herself publicly and dramatically, and 5.56 commented that she had "spoken in school today" -- like "Jeremy Spoken," the quintessential school shooter glorification video (like the other school shooter glorification video, Pumped Up Kicks).
We're also seeing that sure, Adam Lanza played violent games. Or that he was a lonely gamer. Of course we must never, ever, ever draw ANY conclusions from these descriptions, because they were games with furry woodland creatures and not people, and gaming doesn't cause people to simulate things in real life, ever, or else, millions of people would be killing people, and not only a few dozen. Sure.
Not surprisingly there is already a theory that Adam Lanza planned his mass murder out on 4chan.
Who knows if that has ANY basis in reality. And even if we could prove that the Anonymous chatter on Anonymous's 4chan was THAT guy, the shooter, and he really did discuss it, brag that he was going to do it, get egged on, and told "pics or it didn't happen" or all those other lovely forums retorts, there would be a zillion people, especially 4channers, who would tell you that 4chan culture never, ever, ever, ever has anything to do with mass murder -- ever!
And there is an arrest of another teenager in Oklahama who was also said to be planning the exact same sort of mass murder in a school on the exact same day. I have no idea what to make of that story.
I wouldn't put it past any of the Anonymous script kiddies, of course, to backdate and make up all this stuff to make it look like they are relevant -- and naturally there will be all kinds of people checking date and time stamps.
I'm sure Adam Chen will figure it all out for us! Oh, he's explained that 4chan has jumped the shark! Excuse me, it's Redditt where all the cool kids like Tizzers have gone! So many Adam is on Redditt!
Gawker tabulates all the "weird kid" stories about Adam Lanza, but we know that a lot of these things, seen through the lens of the "propaganda of the deed," are coloured by hindsight.
Whatever is found now may be impossible to see as it was in the beginning. Even so, I think somewhere there's an Internet persona who might have manifested all the traits of a mass killer, and been celebrated instead of challenged.
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