What made Adam interested in mass shootings?

How did he get interested and how?

I think he said something about being really interested in mass killings when Virginia Tech happened. I'll see if I can find it.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Here you go !

2006 was when he began lurking on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG forum.

The 2006 Volleyball incident started it all for young Lanza...

nobodysbusiness22 wrote:

2006 was when he began lurking on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG forum.

So did the game get him interested in it?

pnex wrote:

nobodysbusiness22 wrote:

2006 was when he began lurking on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG forum.

So did the game get him interested in it?

I know he did play the game. I have a vague recollection of him making a post indicating so. Having said that, he was never one of the people who made a lot of posts about the game itself.

But he wasn't active in 2006 or even in 2007 AFAIK. His posts were all from summer 2010 to Feb 2012, with most posts between summer 2011 and Dec 2011. So he started bing active on the old forums at roughly the same time when I was ceasing to be active.

The way I see it, V-tech and the chimp incident were particularly important for him. But what exactly triggered his 2010-2011 burst of forum activity I do not know.


The way I remember him was that he did not seem particularly dark or menacing, or like someone who is on the brink of amental breakdown. We had some posters then who felt like high-school or university students and who sounded like they are both violent and depressed. People felt like they are acting as if they might be capable of a shooting. Lanza was NOT one of them, at least for me he was not.


He did stand out as weird though. He made this weird long excel table of school shooters, that to most people felt like a borning collection of numbers - because Lanza never made any analysis, never made any big conclusions or tried to interpret trends. "Lots of trees, but no forest" kind of thread. That was exactly the opposite of what most forum users were interested in.

So his threads got very little acctivity by other users. And sometimes Lanza would reply to his own posts with nobody else being active on that thread. It felt weird. No other forum poster would do that.

His posts also felt to me like they were made by a vey young person. Most posters were between 17 and 25 years old or so. Lanza's posts made me think he is 12-14 or so.

​

Guest wrote:

nobodysbusiness22 wrote:

2006 was when he began lurking on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG forum.

So did the game get him interested in it?

I feel like it's obvious from context clues that Lanza became interested in mass murder and SCMRPG specifically because of Kimveer Gill's rampage. It was widely reported that Kimveer played the game, the shooting happened in 2006, and Lanza had a special fascination with Kimveer.

QuestionMark wrote:

Guest wrote:

nobodysbusiness22 wrote:

2006 was when he began lurking on the Super Columbine Massacre RPG forum.

So did the game get him interested in it?

I feel like it's obvious from context clues that Lanza became interested in mass murder and SCMRPG specifically because of Kimveer Gill's rampage. It was widely reported that Kimveer played the game, the shooting happened in 2006, and Lanza had a special fascination with Kimveer.

That's possible, but it is not a foregone conclusion. 2006 and 2007 was in many ways the moment when the old Danny Ledonne  became relatively popular, lots of new people joined. Including myself.

So looking at the dates alone, the same argument could be done with regards to me: "Oh she joined shortly after Kimveer's attack, so that is probably what brought her to the forums in the first place". But the fact is that I learned about Kimveer's existence only from reading the forums.

I'm not saying it was the same for Lanza, but it could have been.