The Hartford Courant reports that investigators have linked an online username to Adam Lanza, who carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December. The paper is not disclosing the username but has published a few of his activities online. As with so much retrospectively important online ephemera, they're alternately alarming and mundane:

[He] offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s. In one thread on the website thehighroad.org in October 2009 at 1 a.m., the poster believed to be Lanza asks whether a ban on a certain semiautomatic pistol might extend to other weapons. Another poster suggests that he ask the Connecticut State Police. "I always prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid speaking to someone directly. I was just wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish for .32 ACP," the poster suspected to be Lanza responds, referring to ammunition.

The posts the paper examined come from between April 2009 and February 2010 when Lanza was 17. Three years before the massacre he already displayed a familiarity with guns and gun laws:

Advertisement:

"In Connecticut, fully automatic firearms are legal to own but selective fire is prohibited," one August 2009 post states. "I vaguely recall reading … about a company which alters them to fire exclusively automatically (or something in that vein), but I don't know how that process works. For example, with whom would I correspond to modify a Title II M2 Carbine that is currently in another state to fire fully automatically before it is sent to Connecticut?"

The user also had a strong interest in mass killings: