Mother-son bond over guns links Oregon, Connecticut slayings

Mother-son bond over guns links Oregon, Connecticut slayings, The baleful cutting endure anniversary at an Oregon association academy has an awesome alongside with the annihilation at Sandy Hook Elementary Academy that dead 20 pupils and six developed agents associates in 2012.

Like Adam Lanza, the apache in the Connecticut massacre, Christopher Harper-Mercer was active a mostly aloof activity with a mom who aggregate his allure with firearms.

Both belief allegorize the struggles parents face caring for a acutely afflicted child, struggles that can aback advance to a airy aftereffect fabricated easier by accessible admission to weaponry.

"When you activate to accompany accoutrements into the home ambiance breadth you accept that alarming cocktail of behavior, that's appealing unbelievable," said Mary Ellen O'Toole, a above FBI profiler who directs George Mason University's argumentative science program.

Harper-Mercer bears similarities to added academy shooters: a adolescent macho focused on accumulation accident and accustomed out the killings in a military-like mission destined to end in the killer's own death, O'Toole said.

He was a beatnik in his 20s like James Holmes, who dead 12 humans in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012; Jared Loughner, who actively blood-soaked Rep. Gabby Giffords and dead six in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011; and Elliot Rodger, who dead six humans abreast the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus endure year.

Like Rodger, he larboard abaft a agenda that complained about not accepting a girlfriend.

But the allegory to Lanza extends to the relationships both shooters had with their mothers and guns.

Both women were adept gun enthusiasts, not aberrant in abounding locations of America breadth gun buying is accustomed and encouraged. The two mothers accumulated weapons and took their sons to cutting ranges, according to the analysis into the Sandy Hook cutting and the Daily Breeze bi-weekly in Torrance, California, breadth Harper lived for years with her son.

It's simple to adjudicator them in hindsight, but acutely artificial and complicated relationships generally advance to bad or atrocious affectionate decisions with adverse consequences, said analyst Peter Langman, columnist of two books on academy shooters. Abounding afflicted adolescent humans are so broken they're butterfingers of active on their own.

"In some cases, (parents) don't admit there's a problem," Langman said. "In added cases, they're acquainted of their child's brainy bloom issues, but they don't see any affirmation of violence, so they don't see any acumen not to yield their kid ambition shooting."

Parents may aswell use accoutrements to band with a mentally troubled, abandoned adolescent who is bedeviled with weapons and violence, he said.

Laurel Harper's online postings don't announce she knew her son had agitated tendencies, but it is bright she relished her weapons.

Investigators begin eight accoutrements in the accommodation she aggregate with her son abreast the North Umpqua River and addition six at the academy breadth he dead eight acceptance and a assistant afore killing himself endure week.

She wrote agilely about advance rifles and pistols and derided gun-control efforts in "lame states" on Yahoo! Answers application an annual that is affiliated to an email abode associated with her.

"I accumulate two abounding mags in my Glock case," she wrote in a three-year-old posting. "No one will be 'dropping' by my abode uninvited."

Harper could not be amid for animadversion and has not alternate letters larboard by The Associated Press at her home.

The nurse, who confused to rural Oregon with her son from the Los Angeles breadth two years ago, speaks bluntly in the postings about her son's Asperger's syndrome, a balmy anatomy of autism. Experts say that humans diagnosed with Asperger's are not added decumbent to abandon than anyone else.

Investigators said the mother has told them he had brainy bloom issues, but accept not appear details.

Social profiles affiliated to her son appropriate he tracked added accumulation shootings and was absorbed by the Irish Republican Army. Neighbors in the Los Angeles-area suburb of Torrance, breadth the mother and son lived afore affective to Oregon, recalled him as uncommunicative, accepting child-like tantrums and loud fights with his mother, who was overprotective of him.

Adam Lanza's mother Nancy Lanza aswell struggled with her son, who had adorning issues from aboriginal childhood, according to a address appear endure November by the Connecticut Office of the Adolescent Advocate.

The address said Lanza's mother, like Harper-Mercer's, was doting. She attempted to annihilate disruptions to Adam Lanza's activity "entirely through hypervigilance and administration of his symptoms." In emails to her son, she wrote she admired him and capital him to be happy, according to the report.

But Nancy Lanza abandoned her son from the world. And while she approved some analysis for him, she alone added advice and was in abnegation about her son's illness. The boyhood became more absent with accumulation annihilation and affianced in a cyber-community of accumulation annihilation enthusiasts. Afore the shooting, he lived in basic amusing isolation, spent months in his bedchamber with the windows blacked out, and appear with his mother alone through email.

The address says admission to advance weapons with top accommodation magazines "did play a above role" in the Sandy Hook massacre, alongside bare and uncoordinated brainy bloom casework and Adam Lanza's acute captivation with violence. His mother, it notes, "seemed blind of any abeyant adverse appulse of accouterment able admission to firearms."

While a lot of adolescent men who accomplish accumulation shootings appearance affirmation of brainy problems, the all-inclusive majority of mentally ill humans aren't violent.

Liza Long, an adviser at the Academy of Western Idaho, understands what Harper was up against. Her then-13-year-old son, who suffered from brainy illness, pulled a knife on her and threatened to annihilate her and himself.

Long said casework for acutely mentally afflicted accouchement are inadequate, and allowance carriers generally will not pay them. Afore accepting diagnosed and advised for bipolar disorder, her son was misdiagnosed assorted times and she struggled to acquisition residential analysis for him.

"From a mom's perspective, we end up active in abashment and silence," said Long, who wrote a book about her experiences. "You're basically hiding, because you're isolated."

Police accept not appear a motive for Harper-Mercer's baleful rampage. That is acceptable to be based on what they recovered from the agenda he larboard abaft and what his mother has revealed.

Investigators in the Sandy Hook cutting were never abiding what collection Adam Lanza to kill. He destroyed his computer and his mother was his aboriginal victim.
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