Adam Lanza Was NOT a Homeschooler.
After the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, Governor Daniel Malloy created the Sandy Hook Advisory Committee “to review and recommend new gun, school, and mental health safety standards.” In their interim report in 2013, as could be predicted, they recommended a number of gun control measures as well as some school safety provisions. In their most recent report, they recommended, wait for it, stricter supervision of homeschoolers.
The media like to make a big deal about the fact that Adam Lanza was a homeschooler who snapped and committed the horrendous murder of 20 children and six school staff people. There is no question that he did it. The question is, how can any reasonable person believe that homeschooling had anything to do with it? Adam Lanza was not a homeschooler. He was a student who had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome who was having increasing difficulty coping with school. After she removed Adam from school to “homeschool” (at the recommendation of his psychiatrist), his mother, “Nancy, coordinated the home curriculum with Newtown High School to insure that Adam could graduate rather than simply get a G.E.D.” He was not a homeschooler. He was a homebound student who was receiving public school instruction at home. Adam also continued to participate in the school’s Tech Club and soon began to take part time college courses.
Not. A. Homeschooler. Adam Lanza was a troubled young man whose slow slide into dysfunction could have been exacerbated by many things, including his parents’ divorce, but his connections with the public school system and the mental health system clearly did not help him, as described in a March, 2014, article in The New Yorker. He was 20 years old and had been drifting for a while when he killed his mother, massacred the children and staff at Sandy Hook, and then took his own life. Stricter regulations for homeschoolers would not have prevented that. Stricter gun control regulations probably would not have either, considering that his mother was a gun aficionado who felt safe enough to leave her guns where he could get them.
We must not let the government use tragedies like this as an opportunity to continue to take away the freedoms of law-abiding people. Every time there is a shooting like this, the left screams for more gun control. Placing any blame on homeschooling for Adam Lanza’s actions is just more of the same. In this situation, the schools had him for most of his educational career. Why don’t we investigate what they did wrong to cause his breakdown?
