The Connecticut School Massacre

n Friday, December 14 of this year, Adam Lanza—a 20-year-old dressed in black fatigues and a military vest—killed his mother at home and then took an arsenal of weapons and ammunition to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Within minutes he had executed 26 people—20 of them 6-7 years old—and killed himself.

This kind of event has happened before—Columbine and Virginia Tech come to mind—but what makes my head spin is not that such things happen but how we react to them. In the past couple of days I have listened to commentators, reporters, and reputed experts, and although they almost uniformly demonstrate a commendable compassion, they also demonstrate an absolutely consistent state of confusion about how such a tragedy could occur.

This confusion is critical, because as long as we keep wailing, "Why? Why? Why?"—an exact quote from one citizen of Newtown—more events like it are guaranteed. I share the sadness of those who contemplate twenty-six lives suddenly snuffed out, but I am far more interested in our understanding and preventing such occurrences.

I don't know the Lanza family personally, so I intend no criticism of them. I don't know enough to do that, nor do I have the right. I can tell you, however, that my experience with parents and children—both young children and adult children—is extensive, so I CAN describe in general terms how an event like the Sandy Hook shooting could happen, and I can tell you that the likelihood of my comments accurately describing the origins of this particular situation are very high.

Children need love like they need air, and without it they suffer as though they were being deprived of air—by choking or drowning, for example. Some children lash out, others suffer more quietly, but they all anguish from the lack of what they need most.

Adam Lanza's parents were divorced in 2009, only three years before the shootings. We talk much about the debilitating effects of divorce, but far more important is the lack of love between and from the parents that CAUSED the divorce. What devastates children, in short, is not divorce but the absence of love that precedes and follows divorce. It is not unreasonable to suppose that this condition would have prevailed in the Lanza home.

Friends and neighbors testify that Adam's mother was angry, obsessed by guns and violence, and connected to very few people. She supposedly "battled" with the school board about the education of her son, which led to her withdrawing him from school and teaching him at home. Before that, he was described as a loner at school and sitting by himself on the bus. In short, he was isolated physically and emotionally, and it is quite impossible that he was not severely affected by these influences. Adam was described as quiet, but eventually pain will drive almost anyone to strike out at others. Experiments have been done on rats, where the intermittent administration of pain drove them insane, to the point where they attacked and ate each other.

Said one article, "the nation (is) reeling at the number of young lives lost." Although certainly motivated by genuine sorrow, this statement reveals a profound ignorance about what is truly important and what is really going on in "the nation." We weep, appropriately, that twenty children died, but there are roughly 75 million children in this country alone, and nearly all of them are being emotionally tortured, an ongoing pain—lifelong in most cases—far worse than the pain of the sudden deaths of twenty children.

Children are not complicated. What they need more than anything—more than video games and iPhones, even—is to feel loved by the people around them. Unconditionally loved, especially by their parents. And yet very few children ever experience enough Real Love to qualify as anything close to a consistent pattern. So these children grow up in horrifying emotional pain—every bit as real and disabling as physical pain—all their lives.

And what are we doing about it? Where are the news conferences? The commentators? Does the President make a tearful statement about the condition that is a greater threat to this country than any Osama bin Laden ever was? No, the lack of Real Love is mentioned virtually nowhere.

"Stuff like this does not happen in Newtown," a local teacher said after the shooting, and the press confirmed her belief by reporting that in the past 10 years, only one homicide had previously been reported in the town of 27,000 residents.

On the contrary, "stuff like this" happens in every town and almost every home every day of every year. That's the problem: unloving behavior is so common that it's not even noticed—much less newsworthy—and therefore not addressed.

"Evil visited this community today," Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy said of Friday's massacre. How convenient to label the event as the result of "evil," as though it were a disorder or aberration that suddenly, randomly descended upon a group of people. It would have been much more appropriate—and certainly more productive—to say, "Today we are reminded once again that we are not addressing the root cause of pain and violence among us. And until we do, this will keep happening."

"It doesn't seem possible," said one commentator. Actually, as long as we continue being unloving to our children and destroying their souls, "it" is inevitable, not impossible.

"How do we stop the violence?" one panel asked. Control guns, they said. Please. In 1994 nearly one million were killed in one hundred days in Rwanda, and there was hardly a bullet fired. People hacked their neighbors to death with long knives--machetes.

So how DO we stop the violence? The answer is not complicated. I talked earlier today with a mother who said this: "The shootings in Connecticut are deeply disturbing to me, because I AM Adam's mother—not literally, of course, but I raised a son much like Adam. I did not know how to love him, so I hurt him deeply, and when he was not much younger than Adam, one day he said to me, 'Mom, I want to buy some guns, go downtown, and turn as many people's heads as possible into clouds of pink mist.' At first I was terrified, but then I realized he was just expressing the level of his pain. Since that time, through Real Love, I have learned to love him much better. It's been a very difficult and painful road—for both of us—but it's also been well worth it. My son is now calm, happy, and even kind on many occasions. No longer does he want to hurt people, and it's all because I learned how to give him what he needed."

A couple of years ago the school system sent me an eight-year-old boy, who had written out detailed plans—with illustrations—about killing his mother. I talked to the boy for several minutes and then turned to the mother, who sat as far from her son as she could without leaving the room. After five minutes of listening to Mom, I said to the boy, "Your mother has been talking for only a few minutes, and already I want to help you kill her."

Obviously, I was joking, but the effect on the boy was immediate. He knew that I understood his pain—that I understood the effect she'd had on him for years—and after that a loving relationship was easy. I taught his mother to listen to her son, instead of thinking only of herself, and their relationship improved dramatically.

With rare exceptions—some genetic disorders, perhaps--people behave destructively only because they are in pain, because they are wounded. Real Love heals wounds—in both children and adults—and thereby prevents the pain that provokes undesirable behavior.

In 1999 thirteen young high school students in Columbine, Colorado were killed by two boys who then shot themselves. Soon after, I wrote to the school districts in all 159 counties of Georgia, my home state. I offered to come to their schools—at no charge—and teach parents, students, and teacher what they could do to prevent a similar incident in their schools. Out of 159 counties, guess how many responded to my offer: 20? 10? No, zero. We talk about the deep love we have for our children, but mostly it's just talk. We want their test scores to improve, but we don't want to talk about their pain, because that would involve looking at ourselves.

We must open our eyes and see what matters. We must see what we and our children are not getting or giving. This level of introspection will not be easy, but without it the carnage—physical and emotional—will continue.