http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/12/newtown_anniversary_should_nancy_and_adam_lanza_be_mourned.html
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It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind excluding a killer. In the aftermath of a tragedy, the shooter becomes the villain. And his family members become the accomplices. The families of the Columbine victims sued the families of the shooters, claiming they should have seen it coming, and won a settlement. In Newtown, after all, it was Lanza’s mother who bought the guns he used. But she didn’t just enable her deeply disturbed son. She was his first victim, shot to death in her bed, and it’s dishonest and unhealthy to simplify the grieving process by depriving her of her proper remembrance.
The black-and-white picture of villain versus victims sells our humanity short.
Whatever blame people assign to Nancy Lanza, Adam Lanza is the one who fired the bullets: first at his mother, then at the schoolhouse, then at himself. His act, the standard narrative suggests, was one of crazed retribution, then malice, then cowardice. Lanza never deserved to live, and so of course he clearly deserved to die. And now that he is dead, the argument goes, his memory shouldn’t be commemorated: It should be cursed.
This notion has an obvious appeal. Anyone who subscribes to it has every right to do so. But as attractive as the black-and-white picture of villain versus victims may be, it sells our humanity short. Painful though it may be to acknowledge, Adam Lanza and his mother were humans, every bit as much as the other victims were. It is Newtown’s tragedy—and the world’s—that those beautiful children and devoted teachers had their humanity extinguished so soon before their time. But it helps no one to pretend that the tortured 20-year-old at the other end of the rifle—and his mother, also killed that day—was not, in some fundamental respect, every bit as much human.
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