December 14, 2012 - December 14, 2022

In three days we will mark the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.

On Friday, December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother. Then he drove to an elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 children. Then he blew his brains out.

I have a small personal connection to Adam Lanza. He and I were members of the Columbine discussion board that preceded this one.

I "knew" Adam Lanza. I interacted with him. I wrote words that he read, and he wrote words that I read.

I don't know what to think about Adam Lanza. Quite honestly, I don't want to think about Adam Lanza. I don't want to think about the things he did. I have no interest in researching his crimes. I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Unfortunately, I'm not good at forgetting.

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Guess I should follow up on my edgy-ass promise

Helianthus wrote:

Quote :

Quite honestly, I don't want to think about Adam Lanza. I don't want to think about the things he did. I have no interest in researching his crimes. I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Making posts about him doesn't seem to be a good way to do that

Yeah, no shit.

I said I *wanted* to forget that he ever existed ... I didn't say I was going to be able to do so.

But whatever.

LPorter101 wrote:

I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Why do you want to forget he existed? Do you think you'd feel the same way if you never interacted with Adam online?

transcendentalauracel331 wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Why do you want to forget he existed? Do you think you'd feel the same way if you never interacted with Adam online?

No, I don't think I would.

Learning that I *knew* - even in the bullshit sense that you "know" someone online - a guy who went into a kindergarten classroom and murdered 20 children really fucked me up.

I have to be honest - I used to joke around a lot on the old Columbine board. I never mocked the victims or anything like that, but I made lots of jokes about Eric and Dylan. I never idolized them but I almost admired them, in a sick kind of way. I was fascinated by their crimes. I cared about the victims and the survivors, yes ... but their tragedy wasn't *my* tragedy - I had no personal stake in it.

Columbine was *fun* for me. It was a tragedy, but it was fun. It shouldn't have been, but it was.

When I learned that I had "known" Adam Lanza, Columbine stopped being fun.

Adam Lanza never came across as violent - and, believe me, there were people on the board who did seem as if they were on the verge of snapping at any moment. A lot of posters thought he was creepy. More than one person pegged him as a pedophile.

He stopped posting in early 2012, about a year before the massacre. He didn't "quit" the board, per se - he just stopped posting.

Right before he quit, he wrote some posts that hinted at suicidal ideation. I don't remember precisely what he said; I do remember that there were no specific threats to commit violent acts or anything like that. A lot of people were concerned.

In my capacity as moderator, I PMed him to tell him that a lot of people were worried about him, and I asked him if everything was okay. IIRC, he said something like, "If they're so worried about me, they can PM me themselves. I'm fine." Then he disappeared into the digital ether.

LPorter101 wrote:

In my capacity as moderator, I PMed him to tell him that a lot of people were worried about him, and I asked him if everything was okay. IIRC, he said something like, "If they're so worried about me, they can PM me themselves. I'm fine." Then he disappeared into the digital ether.

I could definitely see how that could prevent you from making edgy jokes or having some kind of morbid admiration for the Eric and Dylan.
I've read the logs of Adam's posts before like most people here, but you and other members of the old forum had basically no foresight of what he'd go onto do, so you probably just saw him as a weird guy who made some uncomfortable remarks about pedophilia. Then a while later you realize that guy was a murderer, and it takes you by surprise.
Really, a big thing that the media and random people in general like to push is the whole "HOW COULD YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE WARNING SIGNS!???!?" cliché. But the more I've thought about it, there have been some people I've met in my life that have acted way more bizarre, aggressive, asocial, suicidal, etc. than anything I've seen regarding Adam Lanza's behavior and they've never killed anyone. How was anybody supposed to have known what he would've done? It's not you just call up the cops and are like "This guy is kind of a weird person and I think he might be a future shooter based off of tropes I've seen" people have to make serious threats for law enforcement to be able to detain or investigate anyone.

LPorter101 wrote:

In three days we will mark the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.

On Friday, December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother. Then he drove to an elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 children. Then he blew his brains out.

I have a small personal connection to Adam Lanza. He and I were members of the Columbine discussion board that preceded this one.

I "knew" Adam Lanza. I interacted with him. I wrote words that he read, and he wrote words that I read.

I don't know what to think about Adam Lanza. Quite honestly, I don't want to think about Adam Lanza. I don't want to think about the things he did. I have no interest in researching his crimes. I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Unfortunately, I'm not good at forgetting.

All damn paraphiliacs must be extinct.

Maybe it’s because I was a teen at the time but it feels a lot longer than ten years. I barely paid attention to it when it happened, it wasn’t until roughly 2015 that I started researching or learning about anything related to rampage killings. I should catch up on my research considering how much over the years has been released since.

I bet the families feel like shit knowing that in the ten years since there’s been dozens more shootings, including one in an elementary school with over twenty deaths.

QuestionMark wrote:

Maybe it’s because I was a teen at the time but it feels a lot longer than ten years. I barely paid attention to it when it happened, it wasn’t until roughly 2015 that I started researching or learning about anything related to rampage killings. I should catch up on my research considering how much over the years has been released since.

It really does feel a lot longer than ten years. I was in elementary school myself when I heard about it on the news. The first mass shooting I ever heard about was the Aurora theater shooting a few months earlier because up until that point my parents kind of sheltered me from the news. It impacted me pretty hard, but I never researched that much into it until I was like 13. I was really into the Sandy Hook "truther" stuff when I was in my early teens lol.

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Sandy Hook was a long time ago but it seems so short i guess my sense of time is all fucked up.

I was only 10 years old when Sandy Hook happened. At that time, I didn't really watch the news, especially in the country where I live (as I later found out), there wasn't much talk about this tragedy (only on the first day when everything happened). Therefore, I learned about Sandy Hook only in 2018

LPorter101 wrote:

In three days we will mark the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.

On Friday, December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother. Then he drove to an elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 children. Then he blew his brains out.

I have a small personal connection to Adam Lanza. He and I were members of the Columbine discussion board that preceded this one.

I "knew" Adam Lanza. I interacted with him. I wrote words that he read, and he wrote words that I read.

I don't know what to think about Adam Lanza. Quite honestly, I don't want to think about Adam Lanza. I don't want to think about the things he did. I have no interest in researching his crimes. I just want to forget that he ever existed.

Unfortunately, I'm not good at forgetting.

I was a member of that forum as well, glad I don't remember him that well, even though I later found out we posted in the same off topic threads, one after another.

11 years now. Time flies.

QuestionMark wrote:

11 years now. Time flies.

Fax