Did the shooting represent an excerpt from the Big Book of Granny?

In the Big Book of Granny, one of the chapters is named "Dora the Beserker" where Dora sends "Swiper the Raccoon" into a day care center to distract the children. Dora then enters and says, "Let's hurt children."

Dora was also carrying a bag containing an AK-47, an M-16, a shotgun, a musket and a rocket launcher. Over a decade later, did he just want to bring the Big Book of Granny to life?

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eyutytuheu wrote:

In the Big Book of Granny, one of the chapters is named "Dora the Beserker" where Dora sends "Swiper the Raccoon" into a day care center to distract the children. Dora then enters and says, "Let's hurt children."

Dora was also carrying a bag containing an AK-47, an M-16, a shotgun, a musket and a rocket launcher. Over a decade later, did he just want to bring the Big Book of Granny to life?

I really doubt that Adam was trying to replicate a story he wrote more than ten years before his actual attempt at committing mass violence. It does speak to his interest in violence from an early age, however.

QuestionMark wrote:

eyutytuheu wrote:

In the Big Book of Granny, one of the chapters is named "Dora the Beserker" where Dora sends "Swiper the Raccoon" into a day care center to distract the children. Dora then enters and says, "Let's hurt children."

Dora was also carrying a bag containing an AK-47, an M-16, a shotgun, a musket and a rocket launcher. Over a decade later, did he just want to bring the Big Book of Granny to life?

I really doubt that Adam was trying to replicate a story he wrote more than ten years before his actual attempt at committing mass violence. It does speak to his interest in violence from an early age, however.

I'd certainly agree on the latter point you made. I do not think though that we should dismiss the possibility of Lanza having long-held fantasies/plans for a violent event involving children. Spree killers (except maybe for those suffering from psychotic episodes) very rarely snap, most plan killings for months or years. IE: Reportedly, Breivik planned his for 9 years.

We know Lanza had spend a lot of time and effort on researching school shooting and then (using separate online identities mind you) also researching guns and shooting techniques. For all we know, he planned his shooting well in advance. How long we will never know.

I'll just respond with what I said when someone suggested that killing granny in the book was possible evidence that he wanted to kill his mother at age 10.

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sscc wrote:

You might want to keep in mind that everyone gets murdered in that story. Granny's son does kill her a couple of times but Granny and her son also go back in time and kill the Beatles, for which they get sentenced to 75 years in jail. A lot of the killing is actually done by Granny herself, using her rifle-cane. I do think that the stories are evidence that Adam was preoccupied with violence from an early age, probably because he was having emotional issues that he didn't know how to handle on his own, but I'm not sure that it says much about Adam's feelings about anyone in particular, including his mother.

Take out the mentions of killing the mother and replace it with killing children. It's also worth noting that Adam was a child himself at the time that this was written.

Here is some of what the Child Advocate's report said about this book.

Quote :

Clinical reviewers of this work have noted that the violence depicted far exceeds that typically found in the drawing and creative writing of boys of this age.

Quote :

Most striking during this period of AL’s life is the publication and submission of “The Big Book of Granny.” There is intense violence featured in this book, and authors conclude that it was not the sort of creation that most children would even know to invent. Mental health professionals contributing to this report determined that the content of “The Big Book of Granny” can only be described as extremely abhorrent and, if it had been carefully reviewed by school staff, it would have suggested the need for a referral to a child psychiatrist or other mental health professional for evaluation. An appropriate evaluation would have required extended discussion with the child about what the book meant and how it came to be written by encouraging extensive elaboration about what the text revealed regarding the child’s thoughts and social-emotional processing.

Here, “The Big Book of Granny” suggests that while in many ways AL appeared to be positively developing, by the age of ten, on some level, he was deeply troubled by feelings of rage, hate, and (at least unconscious) murderous impulses. While many children, and especially boys, of this age contend with anger and violent impulses in their play and creative productions, “The Big Book of Granny” stands out, to mental health professionals, as a text marked by extreme thoughts of violence that should have signified a need for intervention and evaluation.

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No direct line can be drawn between a disturbing artistic representation at age 10 and an act of mass violence at age 20.

This was not the only violent text that Adam wrote (although the others were mostly described as violent war stories) and while after the fact we keep hearing how excessively violent his writings were, there is no real evidence that any adult who read them was concerned enough to take the time to speak with him about it. There is also no evidence that any teacher alerted his parents to these writings or expressed any concerns to them. His evaluations were almost entirely positive except for his reluctance to participate in classes. If the writings were so obviously disturbing and excessively violent that they foreshadowed real life violence, why didn't anyone do anything about it when he was in elementary or middle school?

sscc wrote:

This was not the only violent text that Adam wrote (although the others were mostly described as violent war stories)

Man I'd really like to take a look at those. I wonder how good a writer Adam was.

sscc wrote:

This was not the only violent text that Adam wrote (although the others were mostly described as violent war stories) and while after the fact we keep hearing how excessively violent his writings were, there is no real evidence that any adult who read them was concerned enough to take the time to speak with him about it. There is also no evidence that any teacher alerted his parents to these writings or expressed any concerns to them. His evaluations were almost entirely positive except for his reluctance to participate in classes. If the writings were so obviously disturbing and excessively violent that they foreshadowed real life violence, why didn't anyone do anything about it when he was in elementary or middle school?

I think that this is what surprises me the most in Adam's case. It was easy to overlook people like Dylan or Jeff Weise who were functioning, if not overly sucessfull, members of their societies. Adam on the other hand was very vividly disturbed, certainly by the time he was a teen.

I feel like Adam's mother was a very destructive force in his life. Whenever any mental health professional started looking at Adam seriously, his mother would pull Adam out of that. I think she wanted to somehow force him into being if not normal, than just being diagnosed with something mild and benign such as Asperger.

I think in her pursuit of saving Adam from the stigma of a severe diagnosis, she has also "saved" him from treatement necessary in such a severe case.

I always laughed at dora and swiper
Definitely plagiarism going on there

Sabratha wrote:

I feel like Adam's mother was a very destructive force in his life. Whenever any mental health professional started looking at Adam seriously, his mother would pull Adam out of that. I think she wanted to somehow force him into being if not normal, than just being diagnosed with something mild and benign such as Asperger.

Could she have been paranoid that treatment would cause worse side effects? Or maybe Adam convinced her to stop sending him to get treatment? I do know Adam had a massive disdain for therapists and the mental health system, he equated it to rape.

I think that the Big Book of Granny is the key evidence regarding to motivation of Adam Lanza being purely sadistic. I think he decided to an hero and it just left him freedom to what he always wanted to do - hurt children.