Nancy Lanza was killed by her son on December 14, 2012. She was gunned down in her home, not the Sandy Hook Elementary School building where 20 children and six other women were murdered. Most media accounts mention 26 innocent victims, understandably excluding the shooter, whom I refuse to name as they do, often at length.
There was a twenty-seventh. Why is she forgotten? Perhaps because people blame her for the acts of her adult son. Perhaps because her guns were stolen and used in the atrocity. Perhaps because she was the sort of paranoid hoarder of weapons and supplies that an assault weapons ban would impact directly. The accounts of Nancy Lanza I have heard paint her as a doomsday prepper obsessed with impending socioeconomic collapse. I have no reason to doubt their veracity. I will even go so far as to say that hostile posture toward the outside world affected her son.
But that is conjecture on my part. Nancy Lanza may have feared the outside world, but I have seen no indication she wished it ill. She was trying to help her son. She wanted him to be happy and well-adjusted. She sounds suspiciously like a concerned parent, but that borders on conjecture as well.
If anything, it appears Nancy Lanza offered the best hope of reaching her son. He was 20, an adult, not a teenager. He bears responsibility for what he did. And she bore the ultimate cost. Imagine her dismay as her own son opened fire. Imagine her last anguished moments. Imagine the sense of failure and regret she would have felt had she survived. Whether or not she is a sympathetic figure, Nancy Lanza is certainly a tragic one. She does not deserve to be forgotten in the same breath that gives her murderous progeny immortality.
