An interview with Peter Lanza, father of Newtown mass murderer Adam Lanza:

The Reckoning

It’s long, sad and surprisingly enlightening. Adam was, in a word, bugnuts. He was a disaster waiting to happen, and everyone around him knew it. He was very much Norman Bates, as it turns out. But in amongst all the high-level crazy, there was one line that struck me as incredibly valid:

…when King [a psychiatrist who examined Adam when he was 14] asked Adam to make three wishes, he wished “that whatever was granting the wishes would not exist.”

Had that line not come from  a monster, it’d be an awesome wish. How many myths and fairy tales and folk legends would have had a happier ending if, when the schmoe is faced with the genie or sprite or witch or demon or angel or god offering one or more wishes, the schmoe thought for a second and wished “I wish you didn’t exist” or “I wish you didn’t have the power to grant wishes.”

The interview brings up a commonly, though quietly, raised issue whenever someone does something horrifying: what about the family that raised them? Sometimes someone turns out bad because they were raised bad, and their parents or guardians were clearly just plain horrible themselves. And sometimes parents do the best they can, and the kid still turns out to be a monster… because he’s genetically flawed, physically brain damaged, chemically befuddled or just plain broken. And in those cases you really have to feel bad for the family of the monster.