Nancy Lanza was a gun enthusiast – Report

Nancy Lanza, the first victim in the Connecticut Shooting massacre, was a gun enthusiast, reports the NY Times. “A big, big gun fan.”

Her son Adam Lanza killed her with a gun from her own collection and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary school where he killed 26 people — 20 of them children aged 6 or 7.

From NY Times:

She was “a big, big gun fan” who went target shooting with her children, according to friends. She enjoyed craft beers, jazz and landscaping. She was generous to strangers, but also high-strung, as if she were holding herself together.

Nancy Lanza was the first victim in a massacre carried out on Friday by her son Adam Lanza, 20, who shot her dead with a gun apparently drawn from her own collection, then drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed 26 people, 20 of them small children, officials said.

News reports on Friday suggested that Ms. Lanza had worked at the elementary school, but at a news conference on Saturday, the school superintendent said there was no evidence that Ms. Lanza had ever worked at the school as a full-time or substitute teacher, or in any other capacity.

She often went to a local restaurant and music spot, My Place, where she sat at the bar, according to a manager there who gave her name only as Louise. Ms. Lanza typically came to My Place alone, said another acquaintance, Dan Holmes, owner of Holmes Fine Gardens, a landscaping company in Newtown, who also met her at the bar.

At craft beer tastings on Tuesday evenings, he recalled, she liked to talk about her gun collection.

“She had several different guns,” he said. “I don’t know how many. She would go target shooting with her kids.”

From Washington Post:

Newtown school shooter’s mother collected guns, was loath to let people inside home

Adam Lanza lived among guns.

His mother, Nancy, collected them. She showed them off to her landscaper.

“Guns were her hobby,” said Dan Holmes, the landscaper of Nancy Lanza’s sprawling yard here on the edge of town. “She told me she liked the single-mindedness of shooting.”

Holmes said she even spoke of taking her son to the firing range to practice his aim.

Her former sister-in law, Marsha Lanza, told the Chicago Sun-Times outside her home in Crystal Lake, Ill., that Nancy Lanza wanted guns for protection. “She prepared for the worst,” Marsha Lanza told the newspaper. “I didn’t know that they [the guns] would be used on her.”

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