Imagine it. A Friday morning, the Christmas holidays just days away. Your elementary school child has just finished breakfast, has her backpack ready to go, homework inside. You drive her to the school near your home and she gives you a quick hug and hops out of the car, eager to join her classmates. You have no idea you will never see her alive again.
The parents and families of 20 young children are now struggling to come to terms with the fact that their children are dead, victims of the second deadliest school shooting in the history of the U.S. Only the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 were deadlier – 32 died.
But there is something particularly horrifying about this mass shooting – at an elementary school in Connecticut, where the 626 students range in age from 5-10, Kindergarten through fourth grade. Kids. Little kids.
The shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, allegedly shot his mother first, at her home, then drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary, where she taught Kindergarten or first grade, we’ve heard reports that cite both. At 9:40 AM Lanza allegedly entered the school wearing a mask and black clothing. He first killed the principal and the school psychologist execution style, then went into the class where his mother taught.
He was armed with three weapons – A Glock, a Sig Sauer, and a Bushmaster .223 – an assault rifle, a combat weapon that allows the shooter to fire up to six bullets a second. According to some reports, he fired at least 100 rounds, mowing down 20 young kids.
How many more horrors is it going to take before lawmakers in this country change the gun laws? How many more Gabby Giffords, Columbines, Virginia Techs, Sikh Temples, Oregon malls and Aurora Colorados is it going to take before lawmakers wake up to the fact that the second amendment was written in 1791 and that world no longer exists? How many more tragedies will it take to break the hold the National Rifle Association has on lawmakers?
Assault weapons aren’t used for hunting. They’re used in combat zones, in war, to kill people. Why should any ordinary citizen have the right to purchase one of these things?
As with so many stories that reach a tipping point in the media, global stories, there’s a strange synchronicity with this one: the guns were registered and bought legally by Nancy Lanza, the shooter’s mother. A dark trickster synchro, this one. And dark trickster synchros sometimes reveal, over time, other elements that played into the tragedy.
When I first heard the news that Nancy Lanza had purchased these weapons, my initial reaction was simple: Why would any parent buy an assault weapon? What was really going on here?
We may never know the full truth. We may never know why a twenty-year-old man killed his mother, then drove her car to the school where she taught and killed 20 of her young students. Psychologist are already having a field day with this one. A psychologist interviewed on MSNBC gave what sounded like a Freudian explanation. Adam killed the person he loved (mom) then killed the youngsters whom she loved. Somehow, that explanation sounds too simplistic.
I think there’s a whole other layer to this story that may explain why Nancy Lanza, an elementary school teacher, bought an assault weapon. Maybe it involves her divorce, her ex; maybe it’s something else altogether. But as an ex-teacher, an ex-prison librarian, and a novelist who has written about the dark side of human nature, I smell something really rotten here. It’s the stink of family dynamics that have been spoiled and festering way too long.
The bodies of the young children are still in the school, where they fell, while authorities work to establish positive identities. Throughout the day, parents waited in a nearby firehouse for news about their children, to be reunited with them. At one point the governor told these parents: “If you haven’t been reunited with your children by now, there will not be any reunion.”
I can’t imagine being one of the parents who had not yet been reunited with their child.
Interestingly, the NRA has been silent on this. No tweets, no public statements. Yet, when Rob and I heard the story today, he went on their website and read their usual pap: More guns means greater safety, or something to that effect.
Twitter users are expressing their anger at the NRA:
I’m calling my family to make sure my 6yr old niece in CT is safe.
Are you purchasing a firearm for someone this holiday season?
So the shooter in Connecticut must have been defending himself, right NRA? Keep up the good work!
Well, you won, NRA. Come on forward and claim your prize.
How many of your agents do you have visiting the families of gun violence victims to explain why firearms proliferation is a priority?
You get the idea here. Most of us recognize that the world has changed since 1791. As one tweeter said: The 2nd amendment was written by people who owned muskets and slaves. May be time for an update.
As a country, can’t we do better than this? I mean, really. Little kids. Mowed down at school. Is that the new American story?
UPDATE
As ore information comes out about the Lanza family, we learned today that Nancy Lanza, the mother, was an avid gun collector and often took her sons to a local shooting range. Also, she didn’t teach at the school, so the whole scenario the psychcologist from MSNBC piece together is wrong.
I think there is something much more going on here. I’m not sure what, but this article lays out some very interesting synchronicities.
feed://www.groundzeromedia.org/feed/
Thanks for the link! I think there’s a lot going on here, too, that we may neve know about.
stories such as this horrific saga sometimes leave me without words – this one truly does – i wondered, too, trish, of the mother who bought such weapons – what brought her to do that – AND to have them in a house – accessible to all – with her son who was known to have more than a troubled life – ie autism and/or other mental issues – but regardless of all that – still the bottom line is this: WHY ARE MILITARY WEAPONS – WEAPONS generally – so available to ANYone – any person on the street – anyway – a horrific thing and a sad/sorry commentary for this country – great post –
I had to turn the television off yesterday because all I could do was cry and be helpless. I did watch Pierce Morgan on CNN later that night and was glad to hear him express outrage over our lack of gun laws. I lived in a town right near Newtown for a while – a town that looks like a postcard of perfectness where you would KNOW that it was a safe place to live. So that shoots that idea to hell. Between my daughter (and many others) losing her house during the Sandy storm, and this chilling event of killing, and other people I know suffering extreme depression, it is a difficult time. Is this part of Saturn in Scorpio? That may sound silly – but can’t help wondering. What do you think, Trish as far as the stars go? Not that that changes these sad events.
Maybe it is part of saturn in scorpio, adele. But I also think th energy generally is weird now. More soon.
When the American president stands at his podium and openly cries genuine tears, a man who is the father of two little girls, then we know civilization is fragmenting. Here, yet again, we hear “another shot heard round the world”; but, in this situation, hundreds of shots, and hundreds of thousand of tears being shed. I must add, however, how many tears do we shed when we drop a bomb or send a mortar into a foreign village that murders little children in war? Is that considered different, somehow? Not to me. I have a friend who is quite literally dying; a man who is a Marine officer, retired; a good man, who was in Special Fiorces, and who cannot live anymore with his awarene4ss that HIS guns…yes, HIS weapons….murdered countless children…..and that as a Special Forces Elite, HE was nothing more than an AMERICAN terrorist. No better that Bin Laden. Senseless murder. All of it. Senseless. These are days for wringing our hands and weeping for all that has been lost and continues to be lost. Burning candles, saying prayers. Hoping these tiny acts will bring some semblance of Peace to all who mourn these little ones.
YUP!
I join the rest of the world united in grief over the loss of these children. I wonder why anyone would ever buy an assault weapon. I learned more from this post than I have from anything else so far, Trish. I haven’t had the heart to turn on the TV and learn the details I just read here. My heart is breaking for all of us and wish that something can come from this horrible tragedy that is life affirming, but right now I am not hopeful. I am just sad, right down to my core.
This is truly the worst tragedy imaginable, and my heart goes out to everyone who lost a child or spouse. On the news last night, they cited the statistic that 51% of Americans are in favor of restricting gun owership laws. The other 49% are Second Amendment supporters who want to keep their guns for personal protection, sport hunting, etc. So the country is essentially divided on the issue. Pro-gun supporters argue the line: “Guns don’t kill people; People do.” while the gun manufacturers themselves say that they cannot be held responsible for how their products are used, legally or otherwise. It’s like blaming Chevrolet because some lunatic drove his truck into a crowd, plowing 10 people down in a psychotic rage. The fact remains that these weapons already exist, and someone determined enough will find a way to get their hands on them. But I completely agree that there is absolutely no reason to sell military assault weapons to the general public, and that the law needs to be changed for the 21st century world that we live in.
Someone once said that the USA was the West gone too far west. I think they had a point there. It’s this whole idea of freedom and individual rights, without the tempering realisation that there is no such thing as perfect freedom when you are in relationships, when you are in community. The right to own a murder weapon surely must be weighed against the cost to the community. Glad we got smart in Australia and banned most of these things.
I know it won’t make anyone feel any better, but China went through a whole spate of these kindergarten massacres about a year or two ago, about half a dozen in just a few months. The murderers used knives, however. The government then banned all reporting of them. Not long after one of my friends in China told me that the principal of the small kindergarten in Shanghai where his daughter went was stabbed and killed in her office in the middle of the school day. Sure enough, there was not a word in the media. So who knows if these massacres are still going on in China? The almost complete absence of civil society in China is often cited as the cause of these tragedies. The breakdown of community in the USA has also long been noted.
I saw this on the news just before I went to bed last night – about midnight UK time. Horrific, I feel so sad and empty for the children and their parents. I won’t add anything else, I’ve said before about what I think about guns.
I had heard about the shootings over here,but I didn’t know the tragic back-story behind it. Very sad.