Adam Lanza, Peter Lanza, Sandy Hook and autism

I read today Andrew Solomon's piece in the New Yorker about Adam Lanza's father. It's moving, puzzling, troubling, and ends up, rightly, providing more questions than answers.

But I was bothered - no, dismayed - to see the way the author made a swift leap from discussing the psychology of mass murderers in one paragraph, to attributing many of Lanza's problems to autism in the next:

Michael Stone, a psychiatrist who studies mass murder, said that, as children grow up and tasks become more difficult, what seems like a minor impairment becomes major.... 

is followed by this:

All the symptoms that afflicted Adam are signs of autism that might be exacerbated by the hormonal shifts of adolescence. When Adam was thirteen, Peter and Nancy took him to Paul J. Fox, a psychiatrist, who gave a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome (a category that the American Psychiatric Association has since subsumed into the broader diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder). Peter and Nancy finally knew what they were up against.

The article, if you read it carefully, doesn't actually blame Adam Lanza's shooting spree on autism. And Lanza's father, Peter, certainly doesn't:

"Peter gets annoyed when people speculate that Asperger’s was the cause of Adam’s rampage. “Asperger’s makes people unusual, but it doesn’t make people like this,” he said, and expressed the view that the condition “veiled a contaminant” that was not Asperger’s: “I was thinking it could mask schizophrenia.

But it would be terribly easy for someone, reading rapidly over their early morning cup of coffee, not to separate those paragraphs in their mind, and get the impression that autism was the cause of the terrible scenes that took place in Newtown.
 
I realize, given that this is an issue that affects me personally, I'm probably more sensitive to it than most. But given the number of kids who, like my own gentle and brilliant son, will be going to school tomorrow wondering whether they will be avoided in the playground for yet one more reason, I do wish the issues had been spelled out way more clearly than they are, and that Mr Solomon had underlined far more carefully that autism does *not* make you violent or dangerous. For us, it's yet one more round of self-explanation, one more round of defence against shocking prejudice.

Update: another response to Solomon's piece: "A different ending to my Adam Lanza Story, by Liza Long