Adam Lanza may have been obsessed with Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik: report

GlobalPost

Newtown gunman Adam Lanza believed he was in direct competition with Norwegian mass-shooter Anders Breivik, it has been reported.

CBS News cited two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigations into Lanza's rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting said he was motivated by a goal of killing more “easiest targets” than the 77 people killed by Breivik near Oslo in July 2011. 

Lanza, 20, who shot and killed 20 children and six adult staff members at the school on Dec. 14 was also reportedly acting out video game fantasies, attempting to achieve a higher “score” of victims’ deaths, CBS wrote.

The New York Daily News wrote that Lanza had been described as a loner who spent hours, sometimes days, in his bedroom playing graphically violent video games.

The Hartford Courant wrote that Lanza had several news articles about Breivik in a bedrooms at the Newtown home where he lived with his mother, Nancy Lanza.

The Courant said sources emphasized that an interest in Breivik was just one theory to explain Lanza's rampage.

However, the officials told CBS that investigators had found credible evidence that Lanza was probably even obsessed with Breivik.

They found evidence that Lanza zeroed in on Sandy Hook because it had the "largest cluster of people."

More from GlobalPost: Did StarCraft turn Adam Lanza into a killer?

.
 

Sign up for our daily newsletter

Sign up for The Top of the World, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.