Earlier today, CNN reported the shooter’s name as Ryan Lanza. We reported that, found his Facebook page and posted his picture. According to latest updates, this has been debunked. We apologize for passing on the wrong information. We”ll keep you up-to-date as the situation continues to unfold.

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53 COMMENTS

    • Ok UPDATE:
      The father is alive.
      Brian is confirmed as the shooter.
      The Brother Ryan is being questioned by police.
      The girlfriend of Brian is now missing.
      The plot thickens.

      • I’m going to hazard a guess that in the days to come, as the issue of gun control gets discussed, no one will draw the conclusion that the older brother, growing up in the same environment, around the same parents and the same guns, did NOT go on a shooting rampage.

    • UPDATE: A spokeman for the ATF refused to comment on reports that all of the firearms were legally registered to the kindergarten teacher, mother. This means the gunman stole, and killed the owner of said guns.

    • TTAG has been wrong, careless and inept from the start of this incident posting unconfirmed rumours, failing to verify information and failing to distinguish between fact and conjecture. It has now compounded its lack of responsible journalism by deleting its error-ridden stories without properly correcting them.

      I hope you learn some lessons from this. As I posted before (now deleted along with your story wrongly identifying the culprit): credibility is hard to gain and easy to lose.

      As for many of the commentators: I am not sure armed intelligentsia begins to describe many of the hysterical, ill–founded and often disturbing remarks I ave been reading here. Armed, yes. Intelligentsia, doubtful.

  3. Thanks for the update, Nick, but while factually identifying him was fine, if ultimately incorrect(after all, CNN had it first), I stand my my statement that the Facebook post never should have gone up to begin with.

    • I disagree.

      People who desire to learn what kind of a person would commit an atrocity like this would find the information anyways. This is not glorifying the killers actions, nor does this attention do his very dead self any good, glory-wise.

      This is simply giving people who want a fuller perspective easy access to information, and what they do with it is their business.

      • anglosaxongamer: You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, and for that matter, you’re not wrong about “finding it anyway.” That said, if you had seen the comments section on that post while it was up, you’d find you belong to a very small minority in holding that opinion.

  5. We believe his brother Brian was the shooter. Someone had mentioned Ryan was picked up behind the school in the woods, but right now I am watching TV waiting to confirm.

    • See I’m reading that now they believe the shooter to be Adam Lanza, Ryan’s younger brother. Haven’t see anything about Brian.

      This just shows you the confusion that follows events like these. And the networks can blame social media all they want, but the fact is that they are in the “report it first, check facts later” business.

  6. How many times are you guys going to take that post off and then put back? Ridiculous. Pick a position and stand for it.

  8. Shame on you for posting it in the first place. Giving the shooter publicity is the last thing you should be encouraging, and jumping on unreliable data to get hits is the kind of yellow journalism that you should be above. You’re better than this, cut it out.

    • That’s how they normally skew things. Next thing CNN will talk about is the gun did this not the person.
      God bless these little children.

  10. So tragic.
    My vote is we all take a deep breath here, as responsible gun owners, and let the LEOs do their work, and wait until the facts are sorted out.
    Thats the best way to respect the tragedy of all the families involved.

    I’m going home to hug my kids, and next week will be plenty soon enough to debate the inevitable over-reactions and political commentary.

    • Strange how pro gun folks always want to delay talking about the effects of their position until as long after an event like this as possible – it’s almost like they realise deep down that 30 people being massacred makes their desire to own ridiculously powerful weapons a bit disgusting.

      • Sorry, handguns are ridiculously powerful weapons? The shooter used two handguns, he didn’t have the rifle in the building.

        • And yet your bald sttement of fact that he had no rifle is contradicted elsewhere. How do you know he had no rifle? What is your authority? You are entitled to your opinion but not to invent facts.

      • No sir, that’s not it at all.

        But to borrow a comment from another poster: “Don’t mistake a coffin for a soapbox.”

      • Actually, the effects of our position would have been many fewer dead, because those people at the school wouldn’t have been at the mercy of whatever-his-name-is and might have had a chance of fending him off.

      • I agree with JTPhilly here.
        When you react, and take action based on emotion, it is called a knee jerk reaction. Knee jerk legislation to anything is bad. Any good politician will tell you that. The hard part is finding a good politician, but I digress.
        We don’t have the whole story folks. heck they messed up on who the shooter was, and also the fact the dad is alive, so we don’t know who the male body is found in New Jersey.
        We can say this guy was nuts, but was he seeing a professional? Did anyone know of his intentions? Why was this directed at the most innocent among us? I would like all the facts, and less emotion in place. Once we have the picture, we can begin to discuss what if anything could have stopped this tragedy. CN already has an AWB ban, and you need to be registered to own a pistol. So since we don’t know what is any firearm he was in legal possession of, and if any new gun law would have stopped this at all.

      • Great job of blood dancing Hmmmmmmmer. I thought your position as stated here was that you didn’t care what kind of guns we owned in our own home. In fact in one comment you posted that you had bought a rifle of your own. How powerful was the rifle you bought?

        And you’ve never explained how limiting my rights for a crime I did not commit is just or right.

      • You know if all guns were banned you are right in the fact that there would not
        be any more violence because of guns. Instead the next nutjob to come along would just toss a few Molotov Cocktails through the door and burn them to death.
        Then I guess you would want to ban gasoline and bottles. Your argument against guns and about gun owners causing these problems are incorrect, biased and prejudiced!!
        No matter what you try to ban the true psychopath will just find the means to accomplish their desires with another type of weapon or device.
        The only solution to stop murder from ever happening again anywhere in the world is to kill every human on Earth and for the last man/woman standing to commit suicide!!
        Sound stupid and far fetched?? It is the same as your accusing gun owners and their beliefs to be responsible for this tragedy!!
        Get off of their souls, quit dancing in their tragedy to promote your agenda, shut the hell up and either be respectful of the deceased and their families and friends or go someplace where we neither see not hear from you ever again. A soulless heartless person like you are no better than the same politicians an reporters who are dancing right beside you.
        As much as we all either dislike or get tired of MikeyB I don’t think even he has disrespected the vicims of this tragedy today!!!
        You on the other hand…..ludicrous behavior!

        • Amen.
          My sentiments exactly. I considered a reply (which I am sure would have been deleted), but you have said, far more politely, what I wanted to say about the ghoulish promotion and rationalization of more “gun control” by exploitation of the horror caused by the legislative idiocy of “Gun Free School Zones”.

  13. The BBC news wouldn’t say the name of the shooter that was going around at the time because they were not certain it was correct. Meanwhile over here all the outlets, including this site, want to get the viewers and traffic by yelling out whatever information comes up with total disregard for accuracy.

    It seems that you guys retract posts frequently on this sight for inaccurate information. Perhaps you should take the dissemination of information more seriously?

  14. Shooter is reported to be 20 years old, which makes him 1 year too young to but a handgun or handgun ammo from a store. So this means that the two handguns and ammo were either private sales or somehow obtained illegally I would think. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

    • Its all too early. If it is true, yes, he was too young to purchase a hand gun. He could not make a legal private sale in either state either. In CT, you need to go through the same process as if you had to purchase at retail including getting a sales authorization #.

      However, he had an older brother and he may have stolen the guns from his brother in NJ. His brother was in custody in NJ.

      His age and identity has yet to be confirmed.

  17. “Update: CNN was Wrong, Ryan Lanza was Not the Shooter”

    Shouldn’t that be “Update: WE were Wrong, Ryan Lanza was Not the Shooter”.

    Your version isn’t very contrite or forthcoming, considering you libeled an innocent man for an absolutely horrific crime.

    • You’re trying to punish all of us for a crime we didn’t commit, hmmmmmmer. How does that make you any different from RF’s supposed libel?

      • Gee jwm, I guess the difference might be that I haven’t wrongly accused an innocent man of slaughtering 20 kids and 7 adults today, nor did I post his picture up in a worldwide forum to boost my ad revenue.

        Even with your limited brain I would have thought you could tell the difference. Apparently I gave you too much credit.

        • You’ve accused all of us of making it easy for this mad man to commit his crime. As for the insults to my IQ. FOAD. There I can be just as childish as you. And you’ve never answered the questions.

          1 You’ve claimed to own a rifle here on this site. Does that mean you’re in some way responsible for this tragedy?

          2. How is restricting my rights going to address this problem.

        • I answered your ignorant question very clearly – although I should not be surprised that you don’t understand the reply, given the question was so stupid in the first place. If you truly do not understand the difference then you are beyond help.

          1. Yes, I am a bit. Even if I didn’t own a gun I would be a bit responsible too, because I am part of society, not a psychotic bagger who thinks the only person that matters is them, and the rest can go to hell.

          2. Really? You talk about having an IQ to measure and you don’t understand how if there were no guns then there could be no gun massacres? It’s not a very hard concept to grasp. But then, we’re talking about you trying to grasp something obvious again, aren’t we – and we both know how that always turns out.

        • So you ban guns, which aint gonna happen. And I’m glad you’ve finally told the truth about your feelings on gun control. You’ve always told that lie in the past about you didn’t care what guns we own so long as we keep them home. At least you’re telling a little of the truth now.

          Back to the gun ban. It won’t happen. It can’t happen if stats are to be believed. 300 million + guns out there now.

          So instead of adressing the real problems, a broken mental health system and unarmed victims you’re part of the crowd that virtually guarantees these tragedies will continue to happen because we are diverting our energies to fight these endless challengwes to our rights instead of coming up with real solutions to the problem.

          And just out of curiousity, if you really wanted to live in a gun free utopia, why did you leave England and move here? You never heard we have guns here?

          It would have made as much sense for you to move to the middle east and then complain because there were a lot of muslims there.

        • “If there were no guns, there would be no gun massacres.”

          True, no argument here. However, saying that something’s existence creates undesirable effects is not a substantive argument. The same sentence could be: if there were no cars, there would be no car wrecks. If there were no viruses, there would be no AIDS. If there were no ropes, there would be no hangings. If there were no coke heads, there would be no cartels. The list goes on. The statement, while true, has no substance as an argument for gun control.

          Please don’t misunderstand me, my mother is a public school teacher. This tragedy hit me to the core. But, honestly, we can’t legislate 100% good behavior. People who want to kill other people are going to do it. I honestly believe that, considering the amount of explosives found in the Aurora shooter’s apartment, we should all be happy he chose to use the AR and the Glock. All those explosives he had, had they been his M.O., would have likely killed many more people than the gun did.

          I completely disagree withyou, hmmmmmm, not because I can’t understand where you are coming from, but because murder will happen, regardless of law. Shooting people for no reason is illegal, murder is illegal, and this kid having possession of a pistol is illegal. Nothing stopped him from what he did. Yes, maybe having no guns would have cut down the death toll. I won’t argue that. But he wasn’t going to be stopped completely. No law would have prevented this. The only thing that could have, maybe, was an armed citizen in the school. Even that might not have.

          I can understand the premise of Gun Free School Zone Act. It is a noble premise, honestly. However, the unintended consequences have been catastrophic. Additionally, one of the big points was to create additional jail time for school shooters. The problem is, of all the major school shootings since Columbine, I can’t think of one where the shooter didn’t commit suicide. So we have a law that prevents the option of self defense, while promising more jail time for criminals. But, we can’t prosecute people who don’t survive. So the law gives us nothing, except a good feeling for the folks who want father government to protect us, and no extra jail time for criminals. In other words, it seems pretty useless.

    • I have to say, that Nick, Robert and myself have been watching the news for the last 12 hours or so. Despite the mistake, I did not see any post here before the news outlets, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, all stated the the identity was Ryan, not Brian. As soon as I heard there was a mistake, I called Robert, and we had the post up within seconds. No one is perfect, and like Nick I agree as to lessons learned. The reality is that everyone messed up, and we were relying on the best information we had. The retraction was there as soon as we herd that the original report might not be accurate.
      With news cycles measured in hours not days, this is what happens. It was similar to the John Holmes, which was a member of the tea party, just not the right John Holmes. TTAG go that one right, but sure we all got it wrong. TTAG does not have new reporters on the ground, and when Nick reported CNN got it wrong it was because more than likely that was his news source.
      Maybe someday we will have crack reporters all across the US sending us reports, but until that day happens we have to use our best judgment based on main stream media. While we are quick to correct the information you need to also realize that we also try to report and post on things as they come along.
      There were also initial reports that the father had been killed and that was also later changed, although they did say there was a crime scene in New Jersey as well.
      We do our best based upon the tools we have to report what we have.

      • I think the check that Fox, CNN and MSNBC cuts Ryan will be big enough to keep him from legal action further down the food chain, but at the end of the day the statement that he was the killer, with his picture, was clearly made here too, which was untrue.

        I’m not sure that it has ever been tested in court, but I personally don’t think “well he said it first” is going to be much of a defence. If this site had run the headline “CNN says…” then they would have been in the clear, but they didn’t – and making the kind of absolute statement they did in a very fluid situation, when the police haven’t made any official pronouncement atall, was exceptionally stupid, and something I doubt very much will happen here again.

        Lessons have been learned, I am sure, but equally respect has been lost – and that is easier to lose than to gain. This was journalism 101 that was thrown out the window, not the finer points of semi colon use.

  19. “According to multiple eyewitness reports from Aurora, Colorado, including at least one caught on camera by mainstream media news reports in Colorado, James Holmes did not operate alone. There was a second shooter involved. But the media qu
    ickly eliminated any mention of a second shooter from its coverage, resorting to the typical cover story of a “lone gunman.”

    Today, the exact same thing is happening with the Newton, CT school shooting.

    Eyewitness reports of a second shooter now being “scrubbed” from the news”

    http://www.naturalnews.com/038352_school_shooting_lone_gunman_media_cover-up.html

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