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“the shooter has asperger’s”: autism, belieF, and  
“wild Child” narratives

simon J . bronner

Having reviewed hundreds of press reports on school shootings since 2000, I 
find a consistent pattern of narrative speculation about the association of autism 
and more specifically Asperger’s syndrome with individuals who commit mass 
violence in America. In reporting the “motivation” for shootings by teens and 
young adults, the press typically relies on oral narratives provided by classmates 
and family members, rather than medical documentation. Often these reports 
cite odd, unusual, or asocial behavior by the individuals, sometimes prompted 
by bullying or engagement in game or music participation, that lead to an 
unanticipated violent outburst, colloquially called a “meltdown,” “breakdown,” 
or “losing it.” The press reports reflect, or respond to, a more general belief 
found in the population concerning the shooter’s deteriorating mental state since 
childhood and the notion that he, and the shooter is assumed to be male, had 
gone undiagnosed or kept his diagnosis secret in mainstream society, commonly 
with the suggestion that he should have been institutionalized or separated from 
“normal” youth. Pathologizing or folklorizing the phenomenon, observers often 
mention an unrecognized or suppressed “epidemic” of autism or mental illness 
along with speculation about environmental as well as medical reasons bordering 
on the conspiratorial for the contemporary rise of retributional violence by youth. 
Without discounting scientific attempts to understand brain function in relation 
to youth violence, I frame the discourse among such observers in the context 
of folk psychology, a term that has come into usage outside of folkloristics, but 
can be applied to issues of social interaction as manifested in traditional cultural 
practices of children (Haselager 1997; Thomas 2001). The key concept suggested 
by folk psychology is that people as part of their localized cultural experience 
perceive, predict, and explain one another’s actions, thoughts, and motivations, 
often in relation to inherited norms of social behavior expressed through narrative 
and ritual. 

The Intellectual and Cultural Construction of Autism, Asperger’s,  
and Aspies

Although the public has a number of beliefs about autism, and Asperger’s 
characteristics which is usually tied to autism, thus expressing a folk psychology, 
the psychiatric community has a set of definitions it circulates among its 
practitioners, most notably in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental 
Disorders, known by the initialism DSM and a number indicating its edition. In the 
most current version of DSM-5 prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, 
autism is listed under “neurodevelopmental disorders” as “autism spectrum 
disorder.” The disorder entails “persistent deficits in social communication and 
social interaction across multiple contexts, including deficits in social reciprocity, 

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nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, and skills in 
developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships” (American Psychiatric 
Association 2013, 31). The spectrum refers to relative severity of symptoms, 
related in the scientific literature to impairments of the development of the brain 
or central nervous system. Neurodevelopmental disorders that are differentiated 
from the autism spectrum are intellectual developmental disorder, attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder, tic disorder, and developmental coordination disorder 
(American Psychiatric Association 2013, 31-86). Readers will notice the absence of 
Asperger’s syndrome from this list. In DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association 
declared that “many individuals previously diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder 
would now receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder without language or 
intellectual impairment” (2013, 32). 

Autism as a label is a little over a hundred years old, and became popular only 
after 1943 when American child psychiatrist Leo Kanner described eleven children 
with “autistic disturbances of affective contact,” that is, a highly variable social 
impairment that he linked to a neurodevelopmental disorder (Schriber, Robins, 
and Solomon 2014). Kanner differentiated this disorder from schizophrenia that 
Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist who introduced the term “autism” in 1911 
along with “schizophrenia” in his weighty tome Dementia Praecox or the Group 
of Schizophrenias, thought was connected (McNally 2009). Kanner hypothesized 
that the autistic disturbances he observed were inborn and presumably genetic. 
Later psychiatrists described the social impairment that Kanner described as 
“Kanner’s infantile autism,” which appeared similar to the syndrome proposed 
around the same time as Asperger’s. One major difference is the muteness or 
abnormality of speech among Kanner’s children in his study, whereas Asperger’s 
was viewed as more of a social disorder and in the twenty-first century is more 
popularly known (Pearce 2005). Notice of Asperger’s syndrome is credited to 
Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger’s paper “Die ‘autistischen Psychopathen’ im 
Kindesalter” in a German journal of psychiatry and neurology in 1944. In the 
essay, he identified patterns of children who had poor nonverbal communication 
skills (their speech, however, was fluent but long-winded, literal, and pedantic), 
were emotionally detached, displayed egocentric behavior, and were physically 
clumsy. Later clinicians identified additional symptoms of repetitive behavior, 
obsession with specific interests, and normal to superior intelligence despite 
difficulty in conventional school work. Although Asperger noted the association of 
abnormalities with the childhood years, usually among males after starting school, 
he noted that the traits were lifelong. 

Before Asperger’s paper, psychiatric literature included case histories of 
“schizothymic” or “schizoid” patients. Ernst Kretschmer in 1925, for example, 
wrote about a patient who had no friends at school, was odd and awkward in 
social interaction, was observed being oversensitive, and was unhappy when 
away from home. Drawing psychiatric attention, including folkloristic as well as 
psychoanalytic commentary from Sigmund Freud , such patients were described 
as having invented a detailed imaginary world. Freud in 1918 in his famous 
cases of the Wolf Man and Rat Man referred to “infantile neurosis” as a mental 
disorder caused by an Oedipal conflict that has been symbolically noted in the 

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male patient’s early childhood. In adulthood, the patient displays obsessional and 
paranoid behaviors associated later by psychoanalysts with autism (Loewald 1974). 
Freud did not observe violent tendencies in his case histories of young adults 
plagued by this neurosis, but Kurt Schneider in 1923 identified a psychological 
type called “affectionless psychopaths” who pursue their own interests with 
ruthless indifference to other people’s feelings. Although Asperger, Freud, and 
Kretschmer did not mention a propensity for violence in the different childhood 
disorders they identified, Schneider noted the possibility that “psychopaths” could 
harm others in pursuit of their special interests.

The connection of “affectionless” patients to autism owes largely to a 1981 
paper “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account” in Psychological Medicine by 
English psychiatrist Lorna Wing. She introduced the label “Asperger’s syndrome” 
to replace the negative, vague terms “psychopath,” “schizoid,” or “neurotic.” 
Her connection of Asperger’s to autism was based upon similarity of symptoms 
described by Asperger to Kanner’s autism, such as the inability to understand 
that others have beliefs that are different from their own. These neurologically 
based deficits prevent normal social intercourse, including the ability of the 
children to engage in joint fantasy or to empathize with the feelings of others. The 
significance of the connection to autism is the shift to what Kanner (1943) called 
an “innate” disorder with the suggestion of genetic transmittal within families. 

For the first time in 1994, and then in a revision of 2000, the American 
Psychiatric Association in its influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 
Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) listed “Asperger’s Disorder” (299.80) as a distinct 
condition (Klin 2003, 106-7). The primary features, according to the manual, 
were “severe and sustained impairment in social interaction and the development 
of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities” (American 
Psychiatric Association 2000, 80). The stated contrast to “Autistic Disorder” was 
the absence of “clinically significant delays or deviance in language acquisition 
… and spontaneous communicative phrases” (American Psychiatric Association 
2000, 82). No mention was made of a propensity to violence; in fact, the concern 
in the manual for Asperger’s patients was the experience of “victimization by 
others” (American Psychiatric Association 2000, 82). Although the DSM-IV-TR 
noted occasional associations with Depressive Disorders, more frequent was a 
prior diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, estimated 
to affect 3 to 7 percent of all school-age children). As with Asperger’s, ADHD 
primarily affects boys, according to the manual, ranging from ratios as high as 9 to 
1 (Asperger’s is 5:1). DSM-5, released in 2013, however, eliminated Asperger’s as 
a distinct condition and placed its symptoms under a broad category of “Autism 
Spectrum Disorder” (American Psychiatric Association 2000, 50-59). 

Placement of Asperger’s syndrome or disorder on the autism spectrum by 
medical authorities has been disputed, primarily on the bases of the refocusing 
of Asperger’s as a communication disorder rather than a neurological or learning 
characteristic. Some critics who view the autism spectrum as a social construction 
worry that psychiatrists have broadened the population of individuals as patients 
who are at the high functioning end. The diagnosis on the autism spectrum, 
according to this view, will stigmatize these persons and potentially concentrate 

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treatment on communication rather than intellectual and social issues. Another 
argument against the elimination of Asperger’s syndrome as a separate category is 
a cultural defense. One report from the College of William and Mary, for example, 
points out that “Many also see the Asperger’s diagnosis as part of their identity, 
especially those who have lived with the label for many years. By grouping all 
spectrum individuals together, they fear they will lose this, as they will not be 
able to relate or identify with a majority of their autistic peers under the new 
criteria” (Disability Services 2014). This identity for many individuals diagnosed 
with Asperger’s is the “Aspies” who view themselves positively as “neuro-diverse” 
with creative, intellectual, and occupational assets (Robison 2007). They often 
express Asperger’s as a value of being different that they do not want to change 
(Robison 2012). As a group whose members often communicate with one another 
in listservs, online networks, and special groups (including camps), Aspies 
nonetheless worry about being misunderstood, and feared, as diseased, incapable 
of social relationships, and dangerously violent (Robison 2012). Although Aspies 
increasingly advocate for themselves, they are aware that Asperger’s has become 
a folk term with negative connotations in popular culture and folklore (Robison 
2012; Seventhvoice 2013). 

In the psychiatric community, the issue of communication skills apparently 
was a key in the decision to eliminate Asperger’s from DSM-5. The manual stated 
that “individuals who have marked deficits in social communication, but whose 
symptoms do not otherwise meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder, should 
be evaluated for social (pragmatic) disorder” (American Psychiatric Association 
2013, 51). Apparently responding to criticism of cultural standards for social 
communication, especially in narrative competency, the DSM-5 noted culture 
and gender-based diagnostic issues. Acknowledging that “cultural differences will 
exist in norms for social interaction, nonverbal communication, and relationships” 
(and therefore the perception of maladjustment), the manual insisted nonetheless 
that “individuals with autism spectrum disorder are markedly impaired against 
the norms for their cultural context” (American Psychiatric Association, 57; 
emphasis added). It hypothesized, for example, the late- or under-diagnosis of 
autism spectrum disorder among African American children. Still finding more 
males with the disorder, the manual considered the possibility that girls might be 
left undiagnosed because of “subtler manifestation of social and communication 
difficulties” (American Psychiatric Association 2013, 57). 

Another factor in the elimination of Asperger’s from DSM-5 was the concern 
of overgeneralizing behavioral difference into a definite pathology. As one writer 
who self-identified as an Aspie reported in response to the Newtown shooting, “If 
you meet somebody with Asperger’s, you’ve only met one person with Asperger’s. 
Asperger’s is a blip on the far-reaching autism spectrum and no two cases are 
the same. Just as no ‘typical’ person deserves to be tar-brushed with the evil acts 
of another, Aspies don’t deserve the bad press they’re getting” (Inquisitr 2004). 
Parents in a support group I attended for caregivers for youth diagnosed with 
Asperger’s often uttered the statement “If you’ve seen one Aspie, you’ve seen one 
Aspie” as proverbial wisdom, and I heard this saying in conversation with parents 
of Aspies elsewhere (Lovett 2005, 29-30; Snowy Owl 2005; Szalavitz 2009). It 

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counters the adage “Seen one, seen them all,” which suggests that characteristics 
of an individual or thing repeated in other instances, and therefore do not have 
to be witnessed (Ammer 2013, 393; Mikkelson and Mikkelson 2006; Shapiro 
2006, 11). 

Despite the cautionary message in the folklore of Aspies about overgeneralizing 
and pathologizing non-conforming behavior, the term “autistic” has emerged 
in popular parlance to refer to someone socially disconnected or annoying, 
showing up in middle-school slang, so my children tell me, apparently to replace 
playground use of “spastic” and “retard” which has become repressed or obsolete. 
According to DSM-5, Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder are general terms for 
disorders of brain development (autism first appears as a separate condition in 
DSM-III in 1980; in DSM-II, schizophrenics could be identified by “autistic, atypical 
and withdrawn behavior” and autism is totally absent in DSM-I published in 1952). 
In that sense, such disorders are neurological rather than psychological conditions, 
although diagnosis is based upon a checklist of manifest behaviors, not on a 
physiological examination. If it is physiological, skeptics have questioned why so 
many more children are being diagnosed as autistic in the twenty-first century. As 
of 2008, about 1 in 88 children were identified with an autism spectrum disorder 
and boys (1 in 54) are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls 
(1 in 252). In 2002, the number was 1 in 150, or 23 percent lower. Medical sources 
note the difficulty of an exact count of individuals with Asperger’s syndrome, 
but most sources cite an incidence between 1 in 250 to 500 persons (Stanford 
2003, 33-34). That suggests the syndrome to be more common than childhood 
cancer, muscular dystrophy, or cerebral palsy (Bashe and Kirby 2010, 18). Other 
estimates run between 2 to 7 per 1,000, still a small segment of the population 
(Baio 2014; Kuehn 2007). Even if Asperger’s is no longer in the DSM, it is getting 
more attention in popular culture with characters on twenty-first century television 
shows such as “The Bridge” (2013-2014), “Parenthood” (2010-2014), “Glee” (2011), 
“Grey’s Anatomy” (2008-2009), and “Sherlock” (2012-2013). Others such as Sheldon 
Cooper on “Big Bang Theory” (premiering 2007) while not identified as having 
Asperger’s, are popularly associated with its characteristics (Learningneverstops 
2012). Indeed, showing the rise of Asperger’s awareness in public consciousness, 
press reports refer to Cooper as the first, and most popular, situation comedy 
character with Asperger’s (Collins 2010). 

The trend to depict modern-day “oddball” characters having Asperger’s on 
television and movies raises speculation whether Asperger’s cases are more 
prevalent in the twenty-first century because of conditions of modern society and 
environment, including linkages made by commentators to various children’s 
vaccines, drugs (acetaminophen is frequently mentioned), and high-gluten 
and fast-food diets, or the tendency to diagnose autism more for behavior that 
some would call characteristic of children or particularly boys (Park 2011). In 
January 2014, a folkloric event occurred when Jenny McCarthy, host of the 
popular television show “The View,” angrily answered rumors that her eleven-
year-old son Evan was misdiagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome or autism. 
The story was connected apparently with McCarthy’s outspoken criticism of 
childhood vaccinations such as the Measles, Mumps and Rubella shot (MMR) 

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being responsible for the rise in autism rates (Vultaggio 2014). She also claimed 
to have cured her son of autism through a gluten and dairy free diet and vitamin 
regimen she developed from social connections (McCarthy 2008). Many postings 
on social media concerning the rumor referred to her questionable parenting 
as a single mother who served as a model for Playboy magazine (Johnson 
2014). One comment, for example, was that “Jenny McCarthy’s son might grow 
up to be surprisingly levelheaded, which would be a miracle considering his 
parentage” (Nguyen 2014). The comment arose in McCarthy’s public statements 
on her difficulty of controlling her autistic son, who often reported his mother 
to the police. On her XM radio show, “Dirty, Sexy, Funny” she broadcast this 
anecdote: “He [her son Evan] called 911 and said, ‘I am alone in the house. My 
mom abandoned me. I go back in the house and it’s 911 and they’re like, ‘Your 
child just called. Is there an emergency?’ I’m like, ‘What? No! Everything is fine.” 
(Nguyen 2014). Critics use this narrative to question whether she has an active boy 
rather than someone with a neurodevelopmental disorder (Celebitchy 2014; see 
also Gnaulati 2013).

Even Hans Asperger in 1943 wondered if the condition he was observing might 
be, in his words, “an extreme variant of male intelligence, of the male character,” 
which appeared increasingly out of place in a feminizing or domesticating society. 
In other words, he opened for comment that the syndrome he observed was a 
case of “boys will be boys,” which with Euro-American modernization appeared 
abnormal. British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen hypothesized that autism in 
boys might be overdiagnosed to control male behavior in a feminizing society, but 
saw truth to the idea that autistic behavior is related to what he called an “extreme 
male brain,” which presumes differences between typical men’s and women’s 
brains (2004). Another connection to masculinity as a problem in cases of autism is 
in genetics. Research has been undertaken to investigate a folk belief that violent 
and criminal behavior can be explained with a chromosomal deviation. The 
investigation hinges on an additional Y sex chromosome attached to the normal 
XY pairing in males, a rare condition estimated to affect 1 to 1.5 per 10,000 live 
births (Cashion and Roden 2011). In an attempt to explain severe temper tantrums 
and violent tendencies biologically, questions have been raised by popular writers 
as to whether patients diagnosed with Asperger’s have this configuration (Miedzian 
2002, 70-71). 

Another line of biological investigation that responds to folk psychology 
questions the role of parents rather than environment and more often than not, the 
research subject is the mother. One proposed explanation for the rise of autism 
diagnoses, for example, is the increased number of pregnancies by women over 
the age of 40 (Moisse 2010). Although an epidemiological study published in 
2010 confirmed a 51 percent higher risk for mothers over 40 compared to women 
25 to 29, it did not dig down specifically to Asperger’s syndrome (Moisse 2010). 
One study in 2012 that specifically concerned maternal connections to Asperger’s 
children used crowd-sourced data to suggest that women who have a history of 
bipolar disorder or depression are more likely to have a child with Asperger’s 
syndrome than classic autism (Wright 2012). The scientific evidence is growing for 
biological factors contributing to Asperger’s characteristics in children, and even 

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before these studies became publicized, cultural representations of youth with 
Asperger’s often pinned blame following folk psychology on a single, inattentive, 
or depressed mother. 

School Shootings and the Folk Psychology of Asperger’s Syndrome

Why is the tragedy of, and the discourse that followed, the Sandy Hook shooting 
significant toward a modern conceptualization of folk psychology? The answer 
lies in the projection of anxiety about independent children and their parenting 
onto narratives of mental derangement in public space. Here are the facts. Around 
9:30 a.m. on December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, armed with guns and 
ammunition, entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, 
and proceeded to fatally shoot twenty children and six adult staff members. As 
first responders arrived twenty minutes later, Lanza took his own life with one 
of the three guns he brought into the school. One of those responders was also 
Newtown Bee associate editor Shannon Hicks, who sent out the first photographs 
over AP wires of police and teachers leading children away from the school. 
National news agencies rushed to the scene and 24-hour news networks cut 
into programming to give live coverage. Confusion existed about the identity 
of the shooter and in the rush to report the news, national outlets such as ABC 
and CNN mistakenly reported that the shooter was Adam’s brother Ryan and 
that his mother was a kindergarten teacher at the school who was found dead 
inside. ABC News talked to neighbors who described Adam Lanza as “odd” and 
displaying characteristics associated with mental illness. An AP story on December 
17 quoted a high school technology club adviser who claimed that Lanza, who 
was a member, had a “rare condition in which he couldn’t feel pain.” Although 
‘congenital insensitivity to pain’ (CIP), a neuropathic disorder, is associated 
with self-inflicted injuries, press informants interpreted this report as pointing to 
Asperger’s Syndrome (Wagner 2012; see also Magee 1963)). The New York Times in 
its cover story the next day was more specific: “Some former classmates said they 
had been told that Mr. Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome which is considered a high-
functioning form of autism” (Flegenheimer and Somaiya 2012). 

Other reports collected from classmates, counselors, and teachers claimed 
the shooter had sensory integration disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, 
a developmental disability, or autism generally, but the rumor that Lanza had 
Asperger’s had the most traction in print, television talk shows, and social media, 
despite the declaration by H. Wayne Carver II, the state’s chief medical examiner, 
that Asperger’s is not associated with violent behavior and his dismissal of 
Asperger’s as a reason for Lanza’s rampage (Owens 2012; see also Nano 2012). 
Although Carver reported looking for identifiable diseases associated with Lanza’s 
violent action, he told the press that Asperger’s “is simply not on the menu, in 
terms of what is wrong with this kid. Asperger’s is not associated with behavior 
patterns that are violent” (Owens 2012). The state’s attorney’s report issued almost 
a year after the shooting refers to a diagnosis in 2005 of “Asperger’s Disorder” 
related to “significant social impairments and extreme anxiety.” It added that 
he “lacked empathy and had very rigid thought processes. He had a literal 

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interpretation of written and verbal material. In the school setting, the shooter 
had extreme anxiety and discomfort with changes, noise, and physical contact 
with others.” He did not have a learning disability and tested with an overall IQ 
in the average range. The report related his Asperger’s characteristics along with 
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) concerns, emotional and/or Pervasive 
Developmental Disorder (PDD) spectrum behaviors, and high level of anxiety to 
problems of school performance rather than violence. The report underscored that 
“those mental health professionals who saw him [Lanza] did not see anything that 
would have predicted his future behavior” (Sedensky 2013, 35). 

Nonetheless, in the absence of a clear motivation for the killing spree, 
speculation spread about whether Asperger’s explained his outburst of violence. 
And even though reports came out of his OCD and PDD spectrum behaviors, 
public commentary focused on labeling him with Asperger’s (Koplewicz 2012). 
On CNN the night of the shooting, Piers Morgan interviewed psychologist Xavier 
Amador, who told a nationwide audience that “a symptom of Asperger’s, and this 
is one report coming out which may or may not be true, is something’s missing 
in the brain, the capacity for empathy, for social connection, which leaves the 
person suffering from this condition prone to serious depression and anxiety” 
(Christopher 2012). On 60 Minutes on December 16, Lanza family friends Mark 
and Louise Tambascio informed reporter Scott Pelley that Adam’s mother told 
them he been diagnosed with Asperger’s and she complained that it was a full-
time obligation to take care of him, made all the more difficult as a single mother 
(Owens 2012). At the same time, Fox News’s Hannity presented Dr. Marc Siegel, 
who told interviewers, “If he had something called Asperger’s, he may have had 
ongoing meltdown.” His remark was countered by Curtis Brainard, who covers 
science journalism for the Columbia Journalism Review: “There’s absolutely no 
association between autism and acts of premeditated violence, such as those that 
we saw in Newtown” (Garfield 2012). 

Among Adam Lanza’s alleged symptoms was a lack of sociability and narrative 
competency. His high school Latin teacher told a reporter that “he didn’t want to 
be around people.” “He had a great ‘Latin mind,” she said, because the language 
is very structured. Suggesting that he did not fit in because he was humorless, 
she told the interviewer, “The day he made his first joke, I almost cried.” The New 
York Times reported that he was the butt of jokes, stating, “Mr. Lanza’s evident 
discomfort prompted giggles from those who did not understand him” (Halbfinger 
2012). But most quoted informants noted that he was not bullied or ridiculed. Matt 
Baier, a high school classmate, summarized: “From what I saw, people just let him 
be, and that was that.” Others mentioned that he had a positive experience in his 
time at Sandy Hook; there appeared to be no reason for revenge. Although he 
was described as a “shut-in,” classmates remembered a boy involved in outdoor 
activities of soccer and skateboarding in addition to playing video games and 
reading indoors (O’Leary 2013; see also Flegenheimer and Somaiya 2012). 

Classmates mentioned Asperger’s in relation to his “flat affect.” “If you looked 
at him,” an unidentified classmate said, “you couldn’t see any emotions going 
through his head.” Referring to cultural expectations of middle and high school, 
one classmate stated, “In high school, no one really takes the time to look and 

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think, ‘Why is he acting this way?’” Although he was reported talking about aliens 
and “blowing things up,” this was, according to a classmate, “the typical talk of 
prepubescent boys.” If classmates were aware of other social transitions such as 
his parents’ divorce, departure of his brother to New Jersey, and withdrawal from 
his mother, pundits were not linking them to the Newtown shooting as much as 
the attribution of Asperger’s. In a kind of confirming narrative coda common in 
legends, classmates pointed out that he was smart, having been placed in honors 
classes, lending credence to the belief that children with Asperger’s, while not 
socially adept, were savants, or in the vernacular, geeks. In an unconfirmed 
story, a supposed friend of Adam’s claimed that his mother’s threat to have Adam 
committed to an institution triggered the violent rampage. Another blame-the-
mother narrative claimed that his mother’s obsession with guns influenced young 
Adam (Halbfinger 2012). Adam’s estranged father Peter Lanza in various interviews 
tried to answer public association of his son’s violence with Asperger’s by stating 
that it was a name for Adam’s quirky ways but he never thought of it as a 
condition leading to violence. For his father, Adam was a “normal little weird kid” 
who enjoyed his time as a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School (Ellis 2014). 

The connection made in the press and on the street in Lanza’s case between 
mass murder and Asperger’s Syndrome came on the heels of a mass shooting 
inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012. Attorneys for James 
Eagan Holmes, who was arrested for the crime, entered a plea of not guilty by 
reason of insanity but did not disclose the nature of the suspect’s mental illness. 
Nonetheless, on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough caused a row by stating that after he 
heard the news of the shooting, “I knew it was a young, white male, probably 
from an affluent neighborhood, disconnected from society, it happens time and 
time again. Most of it has to do with mental health. You have these people that 
are somewhere, I believe, probably on the autism scale.” Although he admitted 
that he did not know “the specifics about this young man,” he generalized 
that “we see too many shooters bearing the same characteristics mentally” (Joe 
Scarborough 2012). Scarborough was skewered by the mental health community 
for his comments. In response, he issued a statement revealing that he had a 
son with Asperger’s syndrome and claimed that his comments about the Aurora 
shooting were in the context of advocating for stronger support systems for 
youth with autism. He referred to the “growing Autism epidemic” that is, in his 
words, “a tremendous burden for children, parents and loved ones to endure” 
(Zakarin 2012). 

The belief that people with Asperger’s syndrome are violent accelerated when 
police identified 22-year-old Eliot Rodger for a killing spree of students in Isla 
Vista, California, near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, on 
May 23, 2014. Although Rodger had not been officially diagnosed with Asperger’s 
syndrome, Deborah Smith, the principal of a high school he attended, told the 
New York Times that he displayed “classic symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome: He 
was socially awkward, had trouble making eye contact and was very withdrawn, if 
very smart” (Nagourney, Cieply, Feuer, and Lovett 2014). On Twitter, hundreds of 
tweets attributing his violence to Asperger’s appeared with the hashtag #Aspergers 
with the suggestion that the condition, like a hidden virus, is dangerous because 

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people who have it blend into society until a violent “meltdown” occurs. The 
implication was that contemporary society was too tolerant of the mainstreaming 
of persons with mental illness. Another connotation was that Asperger’s was a 
virulent illness that many “geeks,” “gamers,” and loners possess (Roberson 2014). 
Nichi Hodgson answered these knee-jerk responses with the complaint that 
variations on the belief “the dude has Asperger’s” is a “mawkish non-sequitur that 
quickly closes down any further interrogation of the reasons for his actions, and 
the notion of personal agency” (Hodgson 2014). Moreover, the label of Asperger’s 
stigmatizes and pathologizes anyone who seems odd, idiosyncratic, or iconoclastic 
in a mass society. 

Rodger had misogynist feelings of vengeance against women that he expressed 
in a YouTube video and a long manuscript, but these sentiments are not part of 
the criteria of Asperger’s (Hodgson 2014). Voicing the attribution in social media, 
however, offers a physically evident trigger in the absence of a rational motive. 
The tweets could be interpreted as folk beliefs to fill in details not available 
in official reports. Those beliefs not only express post-modern fears of being 
surprised by violent perpetrators in a world of strangers in which individuals’ 
identities and mental states are not manifest, but also indicate the charge of mental 
instability in a child as a function of poor parenting. In a narrative that extends 
from the underlying anxiety about proper child-rearing, youth are most susceptible 
to coming-of-age stress in which students are pressured to conform by totalizing 
institutions that have a role of in loco parentis. According to this scenario, violent 
retribution is the tragic, sociopathic outcome of pent-up frustrations that the 
disease channels abnormally. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown, for 
example, said in an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation” that Rodger 
had been able to “fly under the radar” and conceal his mental instability. “It’s very 
apparent,” Brown said, “that he was able to convince many people for many years 
that didn’t have this deep, underlying mental illness that also manifested itself in 
this terrible tragedy” (Gazzar 2014; see also Inquisitr 2014). 

Of folkloristic interest, commentators on mass shootings frequently reflected 
on a central trait by shooters of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality 
in addition to play and violence, in key cultural practices such as game playing, 
music fandom, and movie watching. Despite the recognition of living in an 
individualistic society that with consumer technology makes it easier to engage 
in activities alone, commentators consistently mentioned the trait of being a 
“loner” as a sign of maladjustment. Further, this social “disability” became a 
problem supposedly in not being able to recognize a culturally formed frame of 
play that might contain violent elements. Of special concern to commentators 
was the relation of secluded individuals to technology when engaged in video 
games with violent content and disembodied messaging through social media 
and texting. Commenting on an inventory of Adam Lanza’s possessions three 
and a half months after the shooting, for example, the New York Times stated that 
“he had cocooned himself in front of electronic game consoles in the basement 
of their home, playing warfare games.” Noting that information on the lives of 
the family to date has yielded little insight, the article viewed the contents as 
affording a “fuller picture of the dark corners of Mr. Lanza’s mind.” Among the 

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items were books connected to autism. The Christian Science Monitor viewed the 
content as revealing “a troubled young man who clipped newspaper articles about 
school shootings and played hour upon hour of violent video games” (Kleinfield, 
Rivera, and Kovaleski 2013). He reportedly had aspirations to become a Marine 
and participated in gun play, which the press interpreted as an oddity for a boy 
(Scherer and Khadaroo 2013). 

Beliefs in a direct link between autism and violence also had come out in 
the case of 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, convicted of killing six and injuring 
thirteen people in a shooting attack in 2011 at a public meeting at a Safeway 
supermarket north of Tucson, Arizona. Medical evaluations diagnosed him as a 
paranoid schizophrenic, but psychologists speculated to the media that he had 
“autism or other mental illnesses.” According to CNN, he “creeped out classmates 
and teachers with his odd behavior” (Fantz and Grinberg 2011). The New York 
Times, however, reported that “Several of Jared’s friends said he used marijuana, 
mushrooms and especially, the hallucinogenic herb called Salvia divinorum … 
none of this necessarily distinguished him from his high school buddies. Several of 
them dabbled in drugs, played computer games like World of Warcraft and Diablo 
and went through Goth and alternative phases” (Barry 2011: 16). The report 
quoted teachers who noted his sudden outbursts in class and asking incoherent 
questions. WrongPlanet, the primary discussion forum for autism, featured a 
thread, “Jared Loughner is an Aspie?” Zen wrote “What annoys me is that every 
time some nutcase goes on a shooting spree, the media is all, ‘He was a loner, 
quiet, kept to himself, didn’t have many friends …’ No wonder we have it rough.” 
In response, Jared Guinther wrote, “I wouldn’t doubt that he is an aspie, but I 
think he has a severe mental illness.” The distinction here is that despite popular 
perception of Asperger’s as a mental illness, Aspies refer to medical literature 
asserting that it is a developmental disability and neurological condition. Indeed, 
they commonly refer to themselves positively as “neuro-diverse” in contrast to 
“neuro-typical” society, and do not look to get “cured” or “fixed” (Jared Loughner 
2011; Scally 2008). 

Before the Newtown, Aurora, and Santa Barbara shootings, I wrote that 
expressive culture suggests an American folk psychology in which youth violence 
represents a failure of individual responsibility and public morality (Bronner 2011). 
For example, “classic” twentieth-century teen legends such as “the roommate’s 
death” and the “boyfriend’s death” portray youth as victims by crazed or insane 
killers, presumably adults, but in the school-shooting discourse of the twenty-
first century, apparently ordinary youth whose problems go unnoticed lash out 
at children unreasonably and tragically, either because of a difficult family life, 
strange habits or clique, or bullying by peers. Nonetheless, the assumption is 
that they were lost socially and emotionally in mass society. When their secret 
“disease” is revealed, lines that were thought to be clear on what is normal and 
what is not are questioned, often with a reference to modern self-indulgence and 
lack of parental or institutional control. Another boundary that gets questioned is 
the division between play and reality, especially one involving violence in games 
and other forms of fantasy entertainment. A status anxiety becomes apparent in 
the role of individuals who in an open, inclusive society navigate on their own, 

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rather than with the support of familiar community structures such as family, 
religion, and school. In the absence of direct motives for an act of violence, an 
undetected disease of the mind, much like a virus without symptoms, is blamed 
for driving a lost, unguided individual to disaster. 

The folk idea of the individual ill-equipped to navigate modern social worlds 
often leads to parables of experience, in the form of wild and diabolical child 
narratives, frequently with the implication that parents have lost control of their 
children in modern society and do not pass ethical values and discipline associated 
with a secure, community-based past to their children. Aware of the predominance 
of these narratives in society, Aspies counter with stories of successful, admired 
historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, or Andy Warhol, who 
supposedly had Asperger’s characteristics of asocial and repetitive behavior. This is 
not to say that there are not individuals who have violent tendencies, but my point 
is that the association of school shootings with an autism epidemic embedded 
in statements claiming a duplicated pattern or plot has a core of unsubstantiated 
belief that potentially projects anxieties of enfeebled masculinity, absent parenting, 
and massification in modern society. The belief especially relates to incidents in 
public space, which act as microcosms of a bureaucratized, impersonal culture in 
which traditional activities of childhood are no longer controlled by communities 
and parents. The discourse is indicative of the uncertainty of post-modern 
boundaries between normal and abnormal in which traditional control of youth 
from generation to generation appears in decline and communities vie with 
institutions for moral hegemony over public space. 

Lorna Wing, who is often credited with popularizing Asperger’s Syndrome, 
resorts to folklore to epitomize the dilemma of Asperger’s as a negative disorder 
or positive condition. She tells the story of Brother Juniper, called the “jester of the 
Lord,” who was one of the original followers of St. Francis of Assisi. A persistent 
legend is his service for a feeble poor man who longed for a meal of pig’s feet. 
Capturing a pig in a nearby field, he cut off a foot and cooked the meal for the 
man. Trouble was that the pig’s owner came to St. Francis in great wrath about 
the slaughter of his pig. St. Francis reproached Juniper and ordered him to make 
amends. Juniper did go to him but retold the tale of the pig’s foot as though he 
had done the man a favor. The owner then gave Juniper the rest of the pig for the 
sake of charity. Her point is that the Asperger’s youth is often unconventional and 
literal, and this can get him into trouble, but the outcomes are usually noble.

But in contemporary discourse, the more frequent legendary reference with 
questioning of the child’s ability to discern between fantasy and reality is likely 
to be stories of the autistic child who, alone at home, tells his returning parent 
that he caught a “troll” (Emery 2012; Mace 2010). Raising narrative questions 
about possible symbolic equivalents of the earlier circulating story of the choking 
Doberman who eats the fingers of a thief who hides in a closet, the troll is found 
to be suffering in the “shut-in” closet. He had been a delivery person or leafletter 
who had come to the door. On Snopes.com, the earliest version dates to 2009 
and two others from 2010 are reported, all from the United States (Mikkelson 
2013). A key element of the narrative is that the child is left unsupervised, 
or lacking parenting, at home. Folklorists might recognize other connections 

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to stories circulating in the early twenty-first century of a developmentally or 
mentally challenged child who, left on his own, brings a penguin home from 
the zoo, thinking the animal is there for the taking, and a small child mistaken 
for a gnome by drug-tripping young adults. Whereas earlier collected narratives 
mention a child with Down’s Syndrome, later ones replace this with Asperger’s or 
mention a “mentally ill” child. The legend invites commentary on the literalness 
of the Asperger’s child, and in the case of the latter, a connotation of adults as 
irresponsible guardians or representatives of an addled popular culture, who have 
a mistaken folk perception of the Asperger’s child.

The uncontrollable or “wild” child and its symbolic equivalence with animals 
has been the subject of numerous narratives since the eighteenth century and as 
late as 2008, often focusing on the consequences of isolation from humans by 
small children. Popular psychologist Bruno Bettelheim may have had an influence 
on the connection of autism in legends of feral children to autism with his famous 
essay in 1959, “Feral Children and Autistic Children,” in which he suggested that 
reports of the feral children were more likely descriptions of autistic children 
rather than infants raised by non-humans. He hypothesized, however, that 
ultimately, the stories point out the problem of “extreme emotional deprivation” 
for abnormal children. Although he does not say so, his thesis raises the possibility 
that the popularity of the animal-parented story, even if the raising by animals 
is untrue, could be a projection of a belief that the rambunctiousness of some 
children, especially boys who resist “domestication,” owes to poor or single-
mother parenting characteristic of a modernizing society. Folklorist Michael Carroll 
observes that the “animal-parented stories,” typically with male children suckled 
by a female parent, demonstrate that a female animal in the absence of a male 
produces an autistic or defective human being and this view is inherent in a folk 
psychology of the “normal” family. His conclusion is that sons who “fail to repress 
their Oedipal desires would suffer disasterous [sic] consequences” (1984: 81). 

Yet an added trope is apparent in the discourse of the allegedly autistic shooter 
in modern America. The son has withdrawn from both mother and father, not 
embraced the mother, and displaced them with popular culture, which he cannot 
relegate to its proper place of fantasy as normal children can. Rather than being 
guided by culture, he is trapped in it, and unable to rely on traditions to help 
him perceive how to act properly, i.e., sedately. In saying he is autistic, narrators 
are projecting an attitude that the child was like anyone else but was not able 
to process the meaning of masculine entertainment. Violence, even if out of 
character, expresses in narrative the adult fear that the child is retrieving the male 
warrior ideal that eliminates the sign of mainstream society — its institutionalized 
children doing what they are supposed to do. In this folk logic, the boy, who 
was confused about what a modern man should do, becomes primal or feral 
and exerts revenge on other children as representatives of childhood and the 
institutions that could not help him. The task, then, is not just to incarcerate him as 
a criminal but to figure out what his frame of mind is, and by extension, examine 
the vulnerability of the cultural frame that surrounds neuro-typical society. The 
discourse of the Sandy Hook, Aurora, and Santa Barbara shootings reveals a folk 
psychology, especially pervasive in America, that the ultimate explanation of mass 

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violence, and the uncontrollable boy, is an invisible internal ailment that points 
away from possible external cultural factors that would make adults culpable.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the American Folklore 
Society annual meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, October 2013, in a panel on 
“Children’s Folklore in the 21st Century: Folklorists of Childhood Respond to 
the Newtown Tragedy,” chaired by Elizabeth Tucker. I am grateful to her and 
to Trevor Blank for encouraging this research. I owe many children and their 
parents willing to talk about purported Asperger’s characteristics, and I especially 
benefited over the years from conversations about Asperger’s syndrome with 
folklorist Patricia Turner. I also appreciate correspondence with June Factor and 
June McKinty in Australia and William Hansen in the United States about a global 
view of American school shootings and wild-child narratives. And hardly a paper 
is written at my desk that I do not owe some intellectual debt to Jay Mechling, 
who always graciously provides keen insights for me to consider. 

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