Free Newtown: An American Tragedy by Matthew Lysiak Page A

injuring nineteen others before shooting himself in the head. Adam posted about the weapon used in the deadly attack: “A ‘9mm’ was listed as ‘.9mm’. People say that 9mm is anemic, but this is ridiculous.”
    Adam also edited details of the Westroads Mall shooting where, on December 5, 2007, gunman Robert Hawkins walked into the Von Maur department store in Omaha, Nebraska, and shot twelve people, killing four, before turning the gun on himself. Adam then diverted his attention to the entry about the “Luby massacre” in Killeen, Texas. On October 16, 1991, George Hennard crashed his pickup truck through the front window of a Luby’s cafeteria, shot fifty people, killing twenty-three, then hid in a bathroom and fatally shot himself before police arrived.
    Adam also made minor edits on the Wikipedia post for Larry Gene Ashbrook, who opened fire on a teen prayer rally at the Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, killing seven teenagers and injuring seven others on September 15, 1999. Ashbrook also committed suicide. The list went on. In an article on mass killer Kip Kinkel, Adam corrected details about the weapons used in the slaying. Kinkel was a teenager when he murdered his parents in their Springfield, Oregon, home on May 20, 1998. The next day he headed to Thurston High School and killed two students and wounded twenty-five others before being apprehended by police.
    The original post listed the weapons as a “9 mm Glock pistol, a Sturm, Ruger .22 semi-automatic rifle, and a Ruger .22 pistol.” Adam corrected the post to read: “9 mm Glock pistol, sawn-off .22LR, Ruger 10/22 rifle, .22LR, Ruger MK II.”
    Other mass killers Adam studied included:
    • Ibrahim Shkupolli, who committed the Sello mall shooting in Finland on New Year’s Eve 2009. Shkupolli killed his ex-girlfriend and four workers at a shopping center before turning the gun on himself.
    • Robert Ryan, who on August 19, 1987, killed sixteen people, including his mother, and wounded fifteen others before fatally shooting himself in the so-called Hungerford massacre.
    • Richard Farley, who on February 16, 1988, killed seven and wounded four others at his former place of employmentin Sunnyvale, California, before being apprehended by law enforcement.
    Two other message boards Adam joined but never posted on were “Northeasternshooters forum,” another board for gun enthusiasts, and “Veggie Boards,” a message board for vegetarians. In February 2010 the posts abruptly stopped.
    A dam received his driver’s license in 2010 but he rarely took out the car. Occasionally he headed to the gun range or drove the four miles to the nearby video game store, but these excursions decreased in frequency over time. He also enrolled in Norwalk Community College in the fall of 2010 but soon dropped out. With his academic career over, there was even less real need to leave his house. He began increasing the amount of time he spent playing video games.
    By 2011, Adam had stopped playing Combat Arms and moved on to Call of Duty and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, both violent, first-person shooting games where, like Combat Arms, players compete to rack up the most number of “kills.” In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the atrocities of combat are re-created by putting the players in the middle of a civilian slaughter. With his hand on the controller, Adam became an undercover CIA agent who joined a group of Russian terrorists at an airport to massacre unarmed civilians. To keep his cover and fulfill the mission’s objective, he had to shoot and kill women and children. The injured wouldcrawl away leaving a smeary trail of blood, while those spared from the spray made the futile attempt to help others only to be shot dead.
    Adam became an expert, able to navigate through the different war zones, killing everything in his path with relative ease. Moving from scene to scene, the skill of quickly reloading before his magazine emptied was vital to