Did Adam ever view child porn or touch a kid?
in my opinion, there is no reason to believe Adam ever behaved inappropriately with a child, or had any sexual interest in children.
in his last years of life Adam was a recluse shut-in who avoided all social interaction. he wouldn’t have had any contact with children other than when he was a child himself. he had an aversion to physical touching. he was repulsed by sexuality in general. he considered himself asexual for most of his life.
Adam did have an interest in the topic of pedophilia, but i am convinced this was an academic/philosophical interest, and not from the viewpoint of a pedophile.
i do have a theory, which i’ll go into here because the pedophilia topic comes up a lot. there have been sensationalized headlines recently straight up calling him a pedophile, but in reality there was no real new information that wasn’t already public knowledge.
this is from a recent article from the BBC:
“…The woman he spoke to regularly said Lanza had expressed some details about his sexuality, including a notion that he may have been asexual. She told investigators he had written “at least one lengthy email” to her expressing his views on paedophilia.In that he expressed his hatred towards it, but she said he had also described adult and child sexual relationships as “possibly beneficial to both parties”.In 2014 the FBI concluded in a behavioural analysis report concluded there was “evidence to suggest the shooter had an interest in children that could be categorised as paedophilia”. But they found no evidence that he had acted on any potential sexual feelings toward children.”
“potential”… “could be categorised”… “no evidence”… yet there are headlines explicitly stating he “was a pedophile”. i feel like this is an attempt to further demonize Adam because people (understandably) want mass murderers to be as other-worldly and monster-like as possible.
so, my theory. it seems more likely to me that, regarding his interest in adult-child relationships, Adam actually saw himself in the role of the child in the scenario. perhaps he had experienced attraction to adult men as a child or adolescent, whether that be emotional, intellectual or sexual. i base this on a few things:
1) there was a recovered folder on Adam’s hard drive entitled smigglesnsuch, (after which this blog is named) in which there was an instant message history between Adam and an unknown online contact, described as “discussion that focuses on gaming, homosexual fantasies, and day to day activities.“ without knowing details, ‘homosexual fantasies’ could be anything from mild curiosity to full-on descriptive fantasy. either way, we can surmise that Adam did have some romantic or sexual inclination towards men, to whatever extent.
(there was also an 8-page word document called ‘.me’, “detailing relationships, ideal companion, culture, voting, personal beliefs, describes doctors touching children as rape.”)
2) also on Adam’s hard drive was a full-length film called ‘Voor Een Verloren Soldatt‘. the plot of the film centres on a consensual sexual/romantic relationship between a 12-year-old boy and an adult male soldier. a review called it “a gay “coming of age” film without “any implied accusation of child abuse. … [T]he film assigns no blame and assesses no damages.”
i don’t know if this was the only full-length film found on Adam’s computer, or if they just included it on the list because it might have been relevant evidence. it would have less significance, contextually, if there were also random general movies on there. however, considering it is an obscure foreign film, it seems he would have had to have gone out of his way to find it and download it. this seems to indicate a strong interest in the subject.
3) also found on his hard drive was a piece of creative fiction that Adam had apparently written himself — a screenplay titled ‘Lovebound’. the plot is described as “describing a relationship between a 10-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man.”
we can’t know without reading it, but my theory is that if Adam was writing from personal feelings, he was approaching the topic from the point of view of the child, not the adult.
while he was extremely intelligent, Adam was not developmentally an adult. he lived in a darkened room playing video games all day and night. his mother took care of all of his practical needs, including doing his laundry. he was over-protected from before he could speak. he had never experienced anything verging on a normal functional adult life or moved on from living in the ‘child role’. emotionally, he was anxious, dysfunctional and child-like. he never had any close friends or peers he could relate to.
without getting more psychoanalytical than i need to here, i think there is solid ground for the theory that Adam had experienced a romantic attraction to adults as a child, which formed the basis of his interest in pedophilia and pedophile rights. pure speculation, of course, but it makes more sense than the idea that he was any kind of sexual predator. there’s no evidence for that.
short answer: no, i don’t believe Adam had any sexual attraction to children or ever did anything untoward. (other than, you know, mass murder.)
(also, Adam’s hard drive = the ‘basement tapes’ of people interested in his case. RELEASE SMIGGLESNSUCH!)