In 1999, two 12th-grade students walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. The so-called “Columbine massacre” was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, and was the first such school shooting to draw nationwide attention.
While Columbine rocked the nation, it was the Sandy Hook massacre on December 14, 2012, that broke my heart.
On that date, a heavily armed 20-year-old man walked into the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school and murdered six teachers and 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 years old. Using a high-powered assault rifle, he didn’t just kill people. He shredded the bodies of little children attending the first and second grades. Some of them were shot multiple times.
Think of your own children when they were 6 or 7 years old and imagine them bleeding and shot full of holes. I can barely envision the carnage.
Afterward, when the photos of the victims were posted online, I cried. I cried for Daniel Barden, who had a habit of sitting next to a special needs girl to “make sure she was OK.” When she would lose her glasses, Daniel would find them for her.
I cried for Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old who used his last few minutes on earth yelling to his friends to run. It’s said that he saved many lives.
And I cried the hardest for Grace Audrey McDonnell, the art student who “saw beauty in everything,” her family said, “and was fortunate to have found her passion early in life.” For her, there was no “later in life,” and her sweet, smiling face touched my heart. It still does, and when I see it even today I still want to cry.
I have chosen Grace to be the image of Sandy Hook that I keep in my mind. Say the words “Sandy Hook” or “Newtown” and I see her face. I made it a point to remember her name instead of the name of the shooter, who deserves no attention for his killing spree and certainly no measure of fame.
The thing about Sandy Hook is this: It was supposed to be the last straw. Seeing the faces of those beautiful little children, my wife and I agreed that unlike all of the others, this school shooting would change the world. It would change the way people viewed school shootings, change the way we looked at people who were potential threats and report the ones we saw, and most of all, change our antiquated gun laws that have their roots in a Constitutional amendment ratified in 1791, when the most common firearms were flintlock muskets and pistols which could only fire one shot at a time.
It was said that a well-trained infantryman in the militia, using a slow-loading musket, could fire four rounds per minute. Today, the U.S. considers a well-regulated militia to include anybody at any age who gets his hands on a gun, including assault rifles capable of firing 60 rounds per minute and even more with a bump stock attached.
The deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history, Sandy Hook did inspire changes. It re-started the debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals for universal background checks and for new laws banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.
From Wikipedia: On January 16, 2013, President Obama created a gun violence task force, to be headed by Vice President Joe Biden. He signed 23 executive orders and proposed 12 congressional actions regarding gun control. His proposals included universal background checks on firearms purchases, an assault weapons ban, and a high-capacity magazine ban limiting capacity to 10 cartridges.
On the same date, New York became the first U.S. state to act after the shooting when it enacted the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act. Other states passed a variety of gun control measures over the following year, but guided by the NRA, 10 other states passed laws that relaxed gun restrictions.
The best hope for significant action came with legislation introduced in the first session of the 113th Congress, which included the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 and the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, a bi-partisan bill that would have expanded criminal background checks to include all sales between private parties with limited exceptions. But it all came crashing down when both bills were defeated in the Senate on April 17, 2013, and the school gun deaths continued.
Now for some sobering facts:
* Far from being the last school shooting in America, Sandy Hook became just another check box on a growing list. Since Columbine in 1999, there have been 416 school shootings, according to the Washington Post, affecting 382,000 American children. Not all of them have been killed, of course, but all of them have experienced the trauma of an active shooter in their schools.
* Starting with Columbine, 83 victims were killed in school shootings from 1999-2014 when Sandy Hook added 26 to the count. In total, including Columbine, there have been 146 people killed in school shootings, according to several sources (listed below).
* None of this includes the hundreds of people injured, or those incidents in which guns were taken into schools but nobody was killed.
On Wednesday of this week, a 14-year-old student walked into Appalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and shot 13 people, four of whom died. Two teachers and two children went to school that day and never returned home. Nine others went to school and left in ambulances headed for local hospitals. They didn’t go home after school either.
Afterward, a law enforcement person stood at a microphone to praise his rapid responders and inform us that the school’s active shooter protocol had “worked.” I’m sorry, but it did not. In the world where I live, you cannot claim that your active shooter protocol worked when 13 shooting victims did not return home after school, and four never will.
Your protocol only “works” if it prevents anybody from being shot. Twenty-five years after Columbine and 12 years after Sandy Hook, people with guns are still killing our children. Maybe it’s your active shooter protocol that needs a little work.
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Statistical sources: The K-12 School Shooting Database, The Violence Project Mass Shooter Database, Mother Jones Mass Shooting Database (through 2023) and Education Week’s 2024 School Shooting Tracker, updated to include Winder, Georgia.
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