Over the last year, we’ve learned that Adam Lanza frequented gun message boards and was obsessed with mass shootings, and tomorrow’s Daily News cover story reveals more disturbing information about the Newtown shooter’s thoughts on violence. Almost exactly one year before the massacre, Lanza called in to the Anarchy Radio show and compared Travis, the chimpanzee who tore a Connecticut woman’s face off in 2009, to “a teenage mall shooter.” While Lanza calls himself Greg and appears to be disguising his voice in the recording, later he discussed making the call in online forums, and two acquaintances confirmed it’s him.
After describing how Travis was raised to behave like a human, Lanza says, “His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation,” adding, “dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best.”
Lanza is articulate and soft-spoken in the clip, and while his argument is certainly disturbing in retrospect, the Daily News’ claim that he “waved a giant red flag that he was about to explode” is a stretch. “There’s nothing there indicating he was considering something so heinous and inconceivable,” Anarchy Radio host John Zerzan told the paper. “It was a year before Sandy Hook, so no one has any idea what he was thinking a year before…I don’t see how anyone could have guessed that with what was said.”
