Flannel Shirt

No news

No real news today. Ramona's mom was a little teary this morning because today was the last day of her preschool. Next year: kindergarten. 

Today was our last scheduled day to pick up Oliver from kindergarten. We did and drove across the river to Vancouver, where Oliver's mom is a dean of students at Clark College. The Clark of the college is the Clark of Lewis and Clark.

Traffic coming back was really heavy. It felt really good to get back home. And Izzy and Gilbert were glad to see us.

Should have gone on that cruise off the coast of Somalia

Thank you, God, and thank you Mammon.

Gunmen stormed a mountaineering base camp in northern Pakistan on Sunday and shot dead nine foreign trekkers and a Pakistani guide as they rested during an arduous climb up one of the world’s tallest peaks, police said.

The night-time raid – which killed five Ukrainians, three Chinese and a Russian – was among the worst attacks on foreigners in Pakistan in a decade and underscored the growing reach of militants in a highland region once considered secure.

Police said a 15-strong team of attackers wearing uniforms used by a local paramilitary force arrived at about 1 a.m. at a group of tents and ramshackle huts used by hikers scaling the flanks of the snow-covered 8,125-metre Nanga Parbat peak.

As the killing spree began, the intruders shot dead a Pakistani guard with the tourists and held other workers at gunpoint, a senior official from the northern Gilgit-Baltistan province said. A Chinese climber managed to escape.

“The gunmen held the staff hostage and then started killing foreign tourists and made their escape,” the official said.

It was the first time foreign tourists had been attacked in the province, where the convergence of the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalayan ranges has created a stunning landscape explored by only a trickle of the most intrepid mountaineers.

Pakistan’s Taliban movement and a smaller militant group both claimed responsibility.

The shootings, which followed several deadly bombings in different parts of Pakistan in the past week, pose a fresh challenge for the new government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is battling accusations that his calls for dialogue with insurgents amount to appeasing violent extremists.

The deaths of the Chinese are a particular blow for Pakistan, which hosted Chinese Premier Li Keqiang last month in a bid to boost trade ties with the Asian giant via their shared border in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told parliament he had sacked Gilgit-Baltistan’s police chief and another senior provincial official, an unusual step in Pakistan where senior officials are rarely held accountable for lapses in security.

The move did little to silence questions from critics who asked how gunmen could have slipped past security forces at check points meant to scrutinize visitors to the sensitive mountain region bordering the disputed territory of Kashmir.

There were conflicting claims of responsibility for the attack. A Pakistani militant group known as Jundullah, with a track record of attacks in the Gilgit-Baltistan province, was the first to say it was behind the raid.

“These foreigners are our enemies and we proudly claim responsibility for killing them, and will continue such attacks in the future,” Jundullah spokesman Ahmed Marwat told Reuters by telephone.

The same group has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in northern Pakistan in recent years, mostly on members of Pakistan’s Shi’ite Muslim minority, known as Shias.

Later, Pakistan’s Taliban movement, which has its centre of gravity closer to the Afghan border, said it had shot the trekkers in retaliation for a U.S. drone strike in May that killed its second in command, Wali-ur-Rehman.

“We wanted to seek revenge for the killing of our leader in the drone attack,” said Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan. “Our attacks on foreigners will continue to protest drone strikes.”

It was not immediately possible to reconcile the competing claims. Jundullah and the much larger Pakistani Taliban are among loosely aligned militant groups that frequently share personnel, tactics and agendas. Claims for specific incidents are often hard to verify.

Recent attacks by Pakistani militant groups have tended to focus on security forces and religious minorities, particularly Shi’ites, but foreigners have also been targets in the past.

In 2002, 11 French engineers and technicians working on the construction of submarines for the Pakistan navy were killed along with three Pakistanis in a suicide bombing outside a hotel in the port city of Karachi. In 2009, gunmen attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in the eastern city of Lahore.

The latest killings followed an attack last weekend in the southwestern city of Quetta, when a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying women students before gunmen stormed the hospital treating survivors. More than 20 people were killed.

 

What makes a criminal?

Here is an article on the genetic versus epigenetic versus sociological causes of criminality.

It's fascinating. Of course, there's the underdeveloped frontal cortex and a few other parts of the brain which cuts down on the circuitry of logic and guilt. If you can commit a crime and not feel guilty about it, you're more likely to think about what you can get away with. 

But then there's a low heart rate. I guess that connects to adrenalin, in two ways. First, you are less likely to get overwhelmed in the midst of, say, a bank robbery or murder. Second, you need to do more extreme things to get your kicks than the average joe or jane. 

I've wondered if football players, particularly quarterbacks, would make great criminals if they'd had very bad homelives as children. And now that I think of it, many athletes turn out that way.

In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.

In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home.

When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a "normal" control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, "the executive function" of the brain, compared with the control group.

The advancing understanding of neuroscience suggested that such a deficiency would result in an increased likelihood of a number of behaviours: less control over the limbic system that generates primal emotions such as anger and rage; a greater addiction to risk; a reduction in self-control; and poor problem-solving skills, all traits that might predispose a person to violence.

Even two decades ago, these were difficult findings to publish, however. When Raine presented a far less controversial paper in 1994 to a peer group, one that showed a combination of birth complications and early maternal rejection in babies had significant correlation with individuals becoming violent offenders 18 years later, it was denounced as "racist and ideologically motivated" and, according to Nature magazine, was simply further strong evidence that "the uproar surrounding attempts to find biological causes for social problems will continue". Similarly, when, 15 years ago, at the urging of his friend Jonathan Kellerman, the child psychologist and crime writer, Raine put together a proposal for a book on some of his scientific findings, no publisher would touch it. That book,The Anatomy of Violence, a clear-headed, evidence-based and carefully provocative account of Raine's 35 years of study, has only now appeared.

The reason for this delay seems mired in ideological enmities. For all Raine's rigour, his discipline of "neurocriminology" still remains tarnished, for some, by association with 19th-century phrenology, the belief that criminal behaviour stemmed from defective brain organisation as evidenced in the shape of the skull. The idea was first proposed by the infamous Franz Joseph Gall, who claimed to have identified over- or underdeveloped brain "organs" that gave rise to specific character: the organ of destructiveness, of covetousness and so on, which were recognisable to the phrenologist by bumps on the head. Phrenology was widely influential in criminal law in both the United States and Europe in the middle of the 1800s, and often used to support crude racial and class-based stereotypes of criminal behaviour.

The divisive thinking was developed further in 1876 by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian surgeon, after he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. Lombroso discovered a hollow part of the killer's brain, where the cerebellum would be, from which he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, again identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics. The political manipulation of such hypotheses in the eugenics movement eventually saw them wholly outlawed and discredited.

As one result, after the second world war, crime became attributable to economic and political factors, or psychological disturbances, but not tobiology. Prompted by advances in genetics and neuroscience, however, that consensus is increasingly fragile, and the implications of those scientific advances for law – and for concepts such as culpability and responsibility – are only now being tested.

Raine is by no means alone in this argument, though his highly readable book serves as an invaluable primer to both the science and the ethical concerns. As the polymath David Eagleman, director of neuroscience and law at Baylor College in Texas, recently pointed out, knowledge in this area has advanced to the point where it is perverse to be in denial. What are we to do, for example, Eagleman asked, with the fact that "if you are a carrier of one particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit a robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offence. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death row inmates do… Can we honestly say that the carriers of those genes have exactly the same range of choices in their behaviour as those who do not possess them? And if they do not, should they be judged and punished by the same standard?"

Raine's work is full of this kind of statistic and this kind of question. (One of his more startling findings is the extraordinarily high level of psychopathic markers among employees of a temping agency he studied, which came as no surprise to him. "Psychopaths can't settle, they need to move around, look for new stimulation," he says.) He draws on a number of studies that show the links between brain development, in particular – and brain injury and impairment by extension – and criminal violence. Already legal defence teams, particularly in the US, are using brain scans and neuroscience as mitigating evidence in the trials of violent criminals and sex offenders. In this sense, Raine believes a proper public debate on the implications of his science is long overdue.

Raine was in part drawn to his discipline by his own background. In the course of scanning his murderers, Raine also examined his own PET profile and found, somewhat to his alarm, that the structure of his brain seemed to share more characteristics with the psychopathic murderers than with the control group.

He laughs quickly when I ask how that discovery felt. "When you have a brain scan that looks like a serial killer's it does give you pause," he says. And there were other factors: he has always had a markedly low heart rate (which his research has shown to be a truer indicator of a capacity for violence than, say, smoking is as a cause of lung cancer). He was plagued by cracked lips as a child, evidence of riboflavin deficiency (another marker); he was born at home; he was a blue baby, all factors in the kind of developmental difficulties that might set his own researcher's alarm bells ringing.

"So," he says, "I was on the spectrum. And in fact I did have some issues. I was taken to hospital aged five to have my stomach pumped because I had drunk a lot of alcohol. From age nine to 11 I was pretty antisocial, in a gang, smoking, letting car tyres down, setting fire to mailboxes, and fighting a lot, even though I was quite small. But at that age I burnt out of that somehow. At 11, I changed schools, got more interested in studying and really became a different sort of kid. Still, when I was graduating and thinking 'what shall I research?', I looked back on the essays I'd written and one of the best was on the biology of psychopaths; I was fascinated by that, partly, I think, because I had always wondered about that early behaviour in myself."

As Raine began to explore the subject more, he began to look at the reasons he became a researcher of violent criminality, rather than a violent criminal. (Recent studies suggest his biology might equally have propelled him towards other careers – bomb disposal expert, corporate executive or journalist – that tend to attract individuals with those "psychopathic" traits.) Despite his unusual brain structure, he didn't have the low IQ that is often apparent in killers, or any cognitive dysfunction. Still, as he worked for four years interviewing people in prison, a lot of the time he was thinking: what stopped me being on their side of the bars?

Raine's biography, then, was a good corrective to the seductive idea that our biology is our fate and that a brain scan can tell us who we are. Even as he piles up evidence to show that people are not the free-thinking, rational agents they like to imagine themselves to be – entirely liberated from the limitations set by our inherited genes and our particular neuroanatomy – he never forgets that lesson. The question remains, however, that if these "biomarkers" do exist and exert an influence – and you begin to see the evidence as incontrovertible – then what should we do about them?

Perhaps we should do nothing, simply ignore them, assume, when it comes to crime, that every individual has much the same brain, the same capacity to make moral choices, as we tend to do now. As Raine suggests: "The sociologist would say if we concentrate on these biological things, or even acknowledge them, we are immediately taking our eyes off other causes of criminal behaviour – poverty, bad neighbourhoods, poor nutrition, lack of education and so on. All things that need to change. And that concern is correct. It is why social scientists have fought this science for so long."

The implication of neurocriminology, though – where it differs from the crude labelling of phrenology, say – is that the choice it presents is not an either/or between nurture and nature, but a more complex understanding of how our biology reacts with its environment. Reading Raine's account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child's development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections – which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy – are made. The science of this is called epigenetics, the way our environment regulates the expression of our innate genetic code.

One result of epigenetics might be, Raine suggests, that "social scientists can actually win from this. I mean, if a child experiences a murder in his or her neighbourhood, we have found that their test scores on a range of measures go down. There is something happening in the brain as a result of that experience of violence to affect cognition. So social scientists can have their cake and eat it. They can say look, we can prove that these environmental social factors are causing brain impairment, which leads to some real, measurable problems."

One difficulty of embracing this "epigenetical" idea of crime is the degree to which such factors should be taken into account in courts of law. There have been several landmark cases in recent years in which particular neurological disorders caused by blows to the skull or undetected tumours have resulted in arguable changes in character and behaviour – and the violent or sexual crime is blamed on the disorder, not the individual. In most of these cases, it has been argued by the prosecution that brain imaging is prejudicial, that the brightly coloured pictures are too compelling to a jury and more emotional than scientific. But if neural scanning becomes more routine, and neuroscience more precise, will there not come a point where most violent behaviour – that of the Boston bombers, say, or the Newtown killer – is argued away in court as an illness, rather than a crime?

Raine believes that there might well be. He even likens such a shift to our change in perception of cancer, until fairly recently often deemed the "fault" of the sufferer because of some repressive character trait. "If we buy into the argument that for some people factors beyond their control, factors in their biology, greatly raise the risk of them becoming offenders, can we justly turn a blind eye to that?" Raine asks. "Is it really the fault of the innocent baby whose mother smoked heavily in pregnancy that he went on to commit crimes? Or if he was battered from pillar to post, or even if he was born with a, abnormally low resting heart rate, how harshly should we punish him? How much should we say he is responsible? There is, and increasingly will be, an argument that he is not fully responsible and therefore, when we come to think of punishment, should we be thinking of more benign institutions than prison?"

But then there is a further thought, that if you start to see criminality as a biological illness, where does a sense of retributive justice stand?

Raine himself was forced to face this dilemma when he became a victim of violent crime. As he recounts in his book, while on holiday in Turkey several years ago, a burglar entered his bedroom and in the struggle that followed tried to cut Raine's throat with a knife. He fought the attacker off, but when the following morning he was presented with two possible suspects by police, he admits to not only choosing the one who looked most like a thug [the man later admitted the crime, under duress], but also to wanting to visit on him the terror he had felt himself.

"I wasn't proud to discover I was a bit Jekyll and Hyde – perhaps we all are in that situation," Raine says when I ask him about his response. "The rational Dr Jekyll knew that if I took this man's brain scan and found he had prefrontal dysfunction, low resting heart rate, a background of neglect, then of course I should cut him some slack. With understanding comes mercy. But the Mr Hyde, the emotional voice in my head, was saying nothing of the sort: he was saying, he cut my throat, I want to cut his. That event changed me from someone dead set against the death penalty to someone who wouldn't be ruled out of a jury on a capital case in America. I think now my mind will always go backwards and forwards on this, the scientific understanding of the causes of crime versus being a human in society with all these gut reactions to people who commit awful crimes."

If the neuroscience raises as many questions as it answers about culpability after a crime has been committed, what about its role in crime prevention? Here, the questions seem no less fraught.

One of them was posed a couple of years ago by the arch-inquisitor Jeremy Paxman of Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, on Newsnight. "If science could predict with 100% certainty who was going to commit a violent crime, would it be legitimate to act before they commit that crime?"

Chakrabarti was in no doubt: "I would have to say that in a liberal society of human beings, and not animals, my answer to your question would be 'no'."

But if such intervention could prevent Newtown, you wonder, or Dunblane, would any of us be quite so certain? The fact is that the reality will always be a much greyer area because even the most nuanced neuroscience will never produce a perfect prediction of human behaviour. But is there a point at which the science – in identifying the possibility of repeat offending, for example – will be accurate enough to warrant routine scanning of those on the sexual offenders' register?

"The fact is," Raine says, "parole boards are making exactly these kind of predictive decisions every day about which prisoner or young offender we are going to release early, often with crummy evidence. At the moment, the predictors are social and behavioural factors, marital status, your past record. What is not used are biological measures. But I believe that if we added those things even now into the equation, we could only improve the prediction."

Raine cites two very recent brain-imaging studies to back this up. One is a study in New Mexico in which prisoners are scanned on release. "What they are discovering is that if the functioning of the anterior cingulate, part of the limbic system, is lower than normal before release, they are twice as likely to be reconvicted in the next three years. And that marker is more accurate a guide than all other social factors," Raine says. A second study apparently shows if a released prisoner has a significantly smaller volume in the amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain crucial for processing memory and emotion, he or she is three times more likely to reoffend. "Now, this is only two studies, but what they are beginning to show is proof of concept, that if we added neurological factors into the equation we could do a better job at predicting future behaviour."

At the end of his book, Raine suggests various possible Orwellian futures of such science, an ethical "slippery slope" of interventions that ultimately imagines a society that assesses the biological risk of all individuals – a wide-scale version of We Need to Talk About Kevin – and pre-emptively locks up those at the extreme end of the curve (a sort of evidence-based Guantánamo). He by no means advocates any of it, though when I ask if he would have his own children, two boys of 11, scanned, he suggests he probably would.

"If there was the opportunity for screening at school or through a GP programme, would I do it? Well, if my kids had problems, as a parent I would want to know about them and I would want to know how I might deal with them. If you brought in such things as emotion regulation and impulse control, which we know are risk factors for behaviour, then to me, as a parent, I would sort of want to know what could be done to help with those."

It is perhaps not too wildly far-fetched to imagine that such scans will one day be as routine as immunisation programmes; the bigger question then will be how we begin to react to the results. Raine rather likes the idea of public health programmes as crime prevention: "The teenage brain is still very malleable. There is good evidence from randomised control testing that omega-3 [fish oil] has a positive effect on young offenders, and even mindfulness seems to improve behaviour and brain structures."

You can't help thinking: if only it were as simple as that.

 

My Imaginary Friend's worshippers are angry at other Imaginary Friends

The utter stupidity of religionists should be embarrassing. It isn't but it should be. 

A pastor in Connecticut has apologized for taking part in a vigil for the victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School because his church does not allow worshiping with other faiths.

Rev. Rob Morris of Newtown’s Christ the King Lutheran Church offered a letter of apology after he was reprimanded by church president Matthew Harrison for “joint worship with other religions,” according to the Religion News Service.

King Lutheran Church is a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which bans ministers from praying alongside Muslims, Jews or even other Christians.

Morris had provided the closing benediction at the Dec. 16 vigil in Newtown.

“There is sometimes a real tension between wanting to bear witness to Christ and at the same time avoiding situations which may give the impression that our differences with respect to who God is, who Jesus is, how he deals with us, and how we get to heaven, really don’t matter in the end,” Harrison wrote in his letter of reprimand. “There will be times in this crazy world when, for what we believe are all the right reasons, we may step over the scriptural line.”

Harrison argued that “the presence of prayers and religious readings” meant that Morris should have not participated in the Newtown vigil.

In his apology letter, Morris explained that he had spoken to his supervisor before participating in the vigil but “I made my own decision.”

“I believed my participation to be, not an act of joint worship, but an act of community chaplaincy,” he said.

Missouri Synod’s Rev. David H. Benke was also suspended for about two years after he participated in an interfaith service with a Muslim imam, a rabbi, a Catholic cardinal and others 12 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Anyone ready to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

On the positive side...

...if they're shooting up newspaper offices they won't be doing mass shootings at the local grammar school. I think there must be something in the Second Amendment about threatening to kill reporters too.

Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”

Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.

The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.

She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.

“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.

Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.

At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.

“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”

 

Probably didn't have a prom date

This.

Hours before a gunman opened fire at a Connecticut elementary school, police in Oklahoma arrested a teenager for allegedly plotting to attack his high school and trying to recruit classmates to help him.

Police in Bartlesville, a community about 40 miles north of Tulsa, arrested 18-year-old Sammie Eaglebear Chavez shortly before 5 a.m. Friday on charges of conspiring to cause serious bodily harm or death. He remained in Washington County Jail on Saturday on $1 million bond, and he is due in court Jan. 11.

Court documents didn't list an attorney for Chavez, and calls to a number listed in court documents as his reached a recorded message saying the line wasn't available.

Layne Jones, an assistant principal at the school, alerted police to the alleged plot on Thursday, according to a probable cause statement. A student told authorities that Chavez had tried to "recruit other students to assist him with carrying out a plan to lure students into the school auditorium where he planned to begin shooting them after chaining the doors shut," police said.

"Sammie tried to recruit other students to assist him with carrying out a plan to lure students into the school auditorium where he planned to begin shooting them after chaining the doors shut," Bartlesville Police Lt. Kevin Ickleberry wrote in the affidavit.

Chavez told the students he planned to place bombs at the doors that he'd detonate when police arrived, and he threatened to kill students who didn't want to join him, police wrote.

Investigators said Chavez told a teacher earlier this month that he had bought a .45-caliber gun and had been learning to shoot it. Also, the affidavit said Chavez had been trying to obtain a diagram of school facilities and had used a school computer to seek information on a .22-caliber rifle that could be mounted on a machine gun platform.

Students said they saw Chavez researching the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, in which 12 Colorado students and a teacher were murdered by two students who also died.

The district alerted parents and faculty by email around noon on Friday that it had investigated a "potential incident" Thursday and forwarded the information to the police department, which dealt with it appropriately. News was still trickling out about the attack in Newtown, Conn., in which a gunman forced his way into an elementary school and killed 20 children, all ages 6 or 7, and six adults before killing himself.

Superintendent Gary Quinn, in a news release, credited administrators' quick action in following up on what he said had been unsubstantiated rumor and presenting their findings to the authorities.

"We appreciate the excellent relationship we have with our local law enforcement and their swift response to the information we provided them. We will always put the safety of the students of the Bartlesville Public School District first and foremost."

Mom loved guns

Adam Lanza's mom "loved guns". "A gun enthusiast".

She was “a big, big gun fan” who went target shooting with her children, according to friends. She enjoyed craft beers, jazz and landscaping. She was generous to strangers, but also high-strung, as if she were holding herself together. 

Nancy Lanza was the first victim in a massacre carried out on Friday by her son, Adam Lanza, 20, who shot her dead with a gun apparently drawn from her own collection, then drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed 26 people, 20 of them small children, officials said.

Their family had been disrupted by divorce in 2008. Ms. Lanza split from her husband of 17 years, court records show, and he moved out. Adam stayed with his mother. His former high school classmates said they believed that he had Asperger’s syndrome or another developmental disorder. Ms. Lanza had an older son, Ryan, who did not live with them.

News reports on Friday suggested that Ms. Lanza had worked at the elementary school, but at a news conference on Saturday, the school superintendent said there was no evidence that Ms. Lanza had ever worked at the school as a full-time or substitute teacher, or in any other capacity.

The authorities said it was not clear why Mr. Lanza went to the school.

Interviews with friends, neighbors and local residents, and an analysis of public records, revealed details of Ms. Lanza’s life and death. To some, she was a social member of the community, a regular at Labor Day picnics and ladies’ nights out. To others, she was a woman dealing with a difficult son and maintaining a public face “with uncommon grace.”

Many of those who knew her were at a loss to describe what she did for a living. (Her ex-husband is an executive at General Electric.)

Ms. Lanza, 52, was a slender woman with blond shoulder-length hair.

She often went to a local restaurant and music spot, My Place, where she sat at the bar, according to a manager there who gave her name only as Louise. Ms. Lanza typically came to My Place alone, said another acquaintance, Dan Holmes, owner of Holmes Fine Gardens, a landscaping company in Newtown, who also met her at the bar.

At craft beer tastings on Tuesday evenings, he recalled, she liked to talk about her gun collection.

“She had several different guns,” he said. “I don’t know how many. She would go target shooting with her kids.”

There's more at the link.

Well, just when it was safe to get over the last mass shooting...

Newtown, CT. 

Meanwhile...

The Michigan Legislature has enacted a bill allowing people who undergo extra training to carry concealed weapons in places such as schools, churches, day care centers and sports stadiums where they previously were off-limits.
The Republican-controlled House approved the bill Friday after it cleared the Senate on Thursday. It now goes to Gov. Rick Snyder for his signature. 

Because if those five year-olds were packing this would never have happened.