US Killer suffers from Asperger Syndrome

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Having AS does not predispose a person to sociopathic behavior. The only documentation of the Lanza's AS that has been presented was in his parents' divorce papers -- no official diagnosis presented into the legal record, just a statement of seeming fact that is not backed up by a diagnosis, but only that what his parents said.

Small minds always look for an easy explanation to the unexplainable. People in the general population -- and within the aspie community unfortunately -- do not understand Asperger's. However, what they do understand is awkward behavior, shyness, lack of "empathy," intelligence and being outside of the "norm." He carried a briefcase, oh my. One word, "Asperger's" presents an easy explanation; it sounds technical and plausible; it fills the mouths of the uniformed and pundit alike; it fills blogs with more characters and take up a few desperate minutes of that 24 hour news cycle.

If Lanza was in fact officially diagnosed with Asperger’s or some other Spectrum Disorder, so be it. Nevertheless, people with Asperger's have nothing to hide no to be ashamed of! Be proud of what makes you – you! Be an ambassador for Asperger’s to the uniformed and ignorant and most importantly, speak for those who have Asperger’s who may not be able to speak for themselves.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-s- ... 16848.html

Pretty much confirmed (the first one especially, who was a director of school security and had a meeting with Adam's mother):

No , Dill, that isnt a doctors response, nor a medical professional's opinion of the situation.

Its just going to continue to muddy the water over this situation until a doctor comes forward and says, yes, this was a valid diagnosis, and he was under my care.

These statements do nothing but bring negavitity to an already overly negative situation.

-- To Billybud's post,

Yes I concur with your assessment, narrow minded people with a lack of understanding things are quick and ready to blame things they do not or are able to understand. The media being too quick to assess this situation and use AS , and Autism for that matter, to drive their stories continues to enflame the situation drastically.

It causes all of us ( and those who support us ) to go into a defensive posture to try to deflect what the media is portraying.

Well it is confirmed that one of the victims had special needs.

Besides everyone here, the only other people I would tell about my Asperger's would be my two closest friends. No one else needs to know.

Sanjay Gupta from CNN says there is no link between violence and aspegers syndrome and in the few cases of aspergian violence they were spontanious not planned.CT state police are sure this was planned because of rifle range records

From link posted in the OP:

December 18, 2012, 12:19 pm65 Comments
Our Sons Are Not Future Killers
By EMILY WILLINGHAM

The Asperger’s stereotype before the shootings in Newtown, Conn., was relatively harmless if inaccurate – that of a quirky, brilliant male unable to read subtle social cues or navigate the world of non-autistic people. Think Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory” or Abed on “Community.”

The reality, like any reality disconnected from network television, is quite different. People with Asperger’s have a highly variable set of skills and capacities, most of them unrelated to brilliance or prepossessing eccentricities. Average intelligence, very real struggles with social navigation, and joblessness are far more prevalent among those with Asperger’s than cute personality quirks like wearing unmatched socks or exhibiting an endless fascination with trains.

But when it comes to ideas about the label my 11-year-old son carries, I’ll take misconceptions about quirkiness and genius over an inaccurate association with mass murder any day. Thanks to the way too many in the media have embraced the Asperger’s label as offering some kind of explanation for the inexplicable, the specter of “Asperger’s boy as future killer” now shadows both those with Asperger’s and their worried families. (Asperger’s syndrome is diagnosed four times more often in boys than in girls.) Adding to that growing darkness is a wildly viral post in which a mother describes her 13-year-old son as violent and emotionally manipulative (not a typical autism trait) and mentions that one diagnosis clinicians have considered for him is autism. She then identifies herself in the post — which uses her real name and a picture of her boy — with the mothers of other mass murderers in our country’s recent history.

Here’s the thing about mass murderers: They are vanishingly rare in the general population. Even when you divvy up the world neurobiologically under labels like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and antisocial personality disorders, mass murderers are still extremely rare in each one. Indeed, rather than falling into categories of diagnoses, most mass murderers fall into categories of mental derailments: the psychopath, the delusionally insane and the suicidally depressed.

As Priscilla Gilman wrote in the Opinion section, autism shouldn’t be blamed for Newtown. Yet in spite of zero evidence suggesting that planned violence is symptomatic of autism or Asperger’s (which is an autism spectrum disorder), many news stories covering the Connecticut tragedy have nevertheless made the stretch. Indeed, they reached, grabbing for talking heads who referred to those with Asperger’s as lacking emotional empathy (they do not), as missing something in their brains that’s key to being human, as “defective.” (The Times’s Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, has said she plans to explore the paper’s coverage of Adam Lanza’s possible Asperger’s or autism disorders.)

The result? I know of worried parents who have called local autism organizations, eyeing their sons with Asperger’s or autistic disorders, wondering if they are looking at future killers. Many more of us are worried that others are wondering the same thing about their sons. That last is a legitimate concern. In the comments to many articles on the shootings, you’ll find otherwise sensible-sounding people writing, for example, that they know 13-year-olds with Asperger’s and anger issues who could themselves become Adam Lanzas when they grow up.

“Anger issues” aren’t the same as “inclined to mass murder.” Autistic people are people, just like everyone else. Personalities accompany their neurobiology. Some express themselves with aggression, just like some non-autistic people do. But autistic people “almost never” use weapons or planned violence when being aggressive, and their aggression rarely involves anyone outside of their immediate circle, Catherine Lord, director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York Presbyterian Hospital, told The Lede blog in The Times as the paper addressed the growing concern that people with autism might be stigmatized by media coverage of the Newtown shootings. In fact, the features of the Connecticut case are more common in non-autistic populations than among autistics.

In spite of these correctives, autistic people and their families are now forced to do two things: mourn the horror in Connecticut and defend autistics against these misrepresentations. The parenting talk on this blog and elsewhere has been about how to engage with children about unspeakable tragedy. I talked to my oldest, autistic son about Connecticut the day it happened and chronicled his empathetic response of deep sadness at the loss and a desire to shield his first-grade brother from it. What my oldest son does not yet know is that I’m shielding him, too. He’s unaware of these stories linking Asperger’s and mass murder. It’s a conversation I’m not quite sure how to have with him, and it’s one we shouldn’t have to have.

According to his parents’ divorce mediator, the shooter in the Newtown massacre received a diagnosis of Asperger’s. That’s as close as anyone has gotten to a real confirmation of that label. It’s slightly better than the “high-school student familiar with Asperger’s” sources and considerably better than speculation based on his loner status, shyness or nervousness. These days, whenever acquaintances describe a person in those terms, the go-to label then becomes Asperger’s or autism. But not all autistic people are loners, and not all loners are autistic. Loners come from all sorts of neurobiological backgrounds. Like most people, loners also rarely become killers.

Asperger’s has carried some heavy baggage in its time. The uninformed see it as a “diagnosis du jour,” as a lame label for children who are just weird, or as a shorthand for harmless, quirky genius. The reality for those with the syndrome is none of the above. But the reality is also not the sensationalist characterization of a cold, unempathetic loner capable of waking up one day and killing dozens of strangers as part of a calculated, vicious plan.

Emily Willingham is science editor at the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, manages the Double X Science blog, and blogs at Forbes.

My understanding is that more men commit suicide than women.