Reflecting on WRIT 1122

Overall, I really enjoyed this class because it gave me a chance to reflect on the news in an informal, yet academic fashion. I appreciated that we covered all sorts of aspects in the news... like the different angles on articles, the role photographs play, ect. Additionally, our textbook really complimented the structure of this class because Harris reveals ways to analyze other peoples' writing and to draw inspiration from it rather than just steal it. I was never really too interested with the news before and now I've definitely started keeping up with it. It's nice to be caught up and engaged with the world around me. It's kind of a bummer that my "10 free articles for the month" ran out on New York Times because I found there were a lot of good stories that were tailored to my interests. However, I've now started going to other websites like the Huffington Post and USA Today to get news. Being "in the know" so-to-speak is also helpful because it makes it a lot easier to engage in conversations with others about the news.

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I remember casually walking up the stairs in my Minnesota home on December 14, 2012 to see my mom crying. On the television there was a little girl being interviewed on CNN; my mom points to it and cries, “Some guy just walking into an elementary school and shot it up this morning. They’ve announced ten-some kids dead. I can’t even imagine… those parents…” That’s the first I heard of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut. Since its occurrence, the shooting and gun control have been the talk of the country.

Twenty children and six adult staff members died in Newton that day and the shooting has been deemed the second-deadliest shooting in American history. The shooter was quickly identified as Adam Lanza, who first killed his mother at their home then brought a semi-automatic rifle into Sandy Hook Elementary and began firing in hallways and classrooms. Afterwards he committed suicide in the woods behind the school.

Lanza entered the school early in the morning by shooting his way through the locked glass door. The noise provoked both the principle and school psychologist to rush to the scene of the crime, to which they encountered Lanza and were immediately shot to their death. Lanza then entered a classroom full of first graders, shooting all of them multiple times. That classroom was where most of the damage occurred; there was a sole survivor: a six-year-old girl who pretended to be dead as Lanza opened fire on all of her classmates. Lanza then coursed his way through the school, shooting students running for safety and teachers attempting to protect their students. It is undeniable that this one of the most heart-wrenching tragedies the United States has ever seen.

Why Lanza did this is unknown. There are a multitude of criminological theories that could be used to interpret his rationale but none would adequately justify his actions. According to an article published by The Telegraph, a newspaper based out of U.K., entitled, “Connecticut school shooting: troubled life of Adam Lanza, a fiercely intelligent killer,” people who knew him growing up had always described Lanza as a “weird kid,” who was both “reclusive and troubled.” He was also reported to have Asperger’s syndrome and another anti-social personality disorder. This is also known as sociopathy, which is the type of personality disorder that is the most closely linked with violence and criminal behavior. Additionally, “fifty percent of the populations in prisons meet the criteria for this diagnosis.” It was very evident to everyone in Lanza’s life that he had a lot of mental problems and was “deeply disturbed.” Lanza’s Asperger’s created a great difficulty within him to communicate with and feel empathy for others. For Lanza and others on the autistic spectrum, this can cause a lot of frustration, which can lead to aggression, but this diagnosis still does very little in explaining what led him to take a semi-automatic rifle to Sandy Hook on that fateful day.

It was also reported that Lanza’s mother was an avid gun collector and liked to take her children target shooting. According to law enforcement sources, between the years of 2010 and 2012, Nancy Lanza purchased four firearms for her home. Furthermore, the gun used to murder Nancy Lanza was one of her own. Due to this, many people across the blogosphere began to blame Nancy for her own death and the deaths at Sandy Hook, no longer referring to her as a victim. Through these facts we could arrive at a consensus that this deadly fusion of mental issues and accessibility to guns killed twenty-seven people, though in further research of this tragedy, it becomes increasingly complicated.

Lanza owned thousands of dollars worth of violent video games and was deeply immersed in video game culture.  [CONTINUE ON WITH THIS]

What drives any person to open fire on a vulnerable crowd? Within a span of just a few months, there have been a profusion of gun deaths in the United States, and after what happened at Sandy Hook, the citizens and the government have started to fight for gun control more than ever. [GO INTO STUFF ABOUT GUN CONTROL]