Ten years have passed since one of the worst school massacres in American history. On Wednesday, the residents of the Connecticut town where the massacre happened remembered the day by holding vigils, paying their respects at a new memorial, and sharing personal thoughts with loved ones.
A heavily armed gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, killing 20 young students and 6 teachers. The incident shocked the nation and permanently connected Newtown, a picturesque New England community, with the epidemic of mass shootings that have plagued the country.
The students who died at Sandy Hooks should have used this year to consider going to college, prepare for SATs and obtain their driver’s licenses. Perhaps going to their first prom. Instead of all this, the families of these kids and teachers who died commemorated ten years without them on Wednesday.
In Newtown, December is a challenging month. Here, the Christmas cheer is tempered with sadness around the anniversary of the country’s worst mass shooting.
The Sandy Hook families and Remington, the manufacturer of the gunman’s weapon, came to a $73 million settlement in February. Alex Jones was condemned by juries in Connecticut and Texas to pay $1.4 billion for spreading false information that the mass shooting was fake.
Towards the middle of November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened close to the new elementary school that was constructed to replace the one demolished following the massacre.
Activism After the Tragedy
Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were two of several families of victims who became activists after the mass shooting. They participated in the creation of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization that strives to stop mass shootings and suicides.
Both Hockley, who lost her son Dylan when he was six years old, and Barden, who lost his son Daniel when he was seven years old, have a hard time accepting that their children have been gone for ten years.
Hockley said that the journey they had been on for years never felt like a decade.
Even after ten years, Barden and his wife are still in shock over Daniel’s death.
Hockley and Barden say that the educational programs and reporting system might have stopped a lot of suicides and maybe even some school shootings.
According to Sandy Hook Promise, over 18 million people have taken part in the program that educates students and teachers about potential signs that someone may be in crisis, and the organization’s anonymous hotline has received over 150,000 tips about people who might be at risk of harming themselves or others.
According to Sandy Hook Promise, the failed attacks, which were allegedly planned in California, Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia, were confirmed by district officials and local law enforcement.
The largest gun safety package in three decades, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the STANDUP Act, the Mental Health Reform Act, and the STOP School Violence Act, were all passed with the aid of the Sandy Hook Promise.
Barden described the group’s effort as a huge delight and a severe duty. And he added that they created something that enables them to use this mechanism to commemorate their children by saving the lives of other children and preventing other families from having to go through their suffering, which is a gift.
What the survivor has to say
When the massacre took place, Ashley Hubner was in her second-grade class at Sandy Hook Elementary. She sprinted to the cubby area with her classmate to take cover. The intercom at the school turned on. Screaming, wailing, and gunshots could be heard everywhere.
Ashley, a senior at Newton High School who is now 17 years old, suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder as well as anxiety and despair like the other kids who were present that day.
Ashley said that every time the anniversary of the mass shooting comes around, she gets more upset and emotional.
Every survivor and the family of the dead of the incident that happened a decade ago are still in shock, and most of the kids who survived that day still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.
What has changed?
Since the tragic event in Newtown, Connecticut, ten years ago, the US has seen an increase in gun violence and shootings. 19 students and two teachers were killed in an attack on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May. The shooter employed a semiautomatic gun similar to the AR-15 in the Sandy Hook massacre.
After this tragedy, people who had survived the Sandy Hook shooting reached out to people in Uvalde through social media.
So far in 2022, the Gun Violence Archive has kept track of 628 mass shootings in the US. A mass shooting is defined as when four or more people are shot in a single incident, excluding the gunman.
They include incidents like a November shooting that left six people dead in a Walmart restroom in Chesapeake, Virginia, and a July shooting that took place at an Independence Day celebration in Highland Park, Illinois.
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The shooter who attacked a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018 was given a life sentence without the chance of parole in November.
Following high-profile attacks, lawmakers have pushed for more significant reforms to the nation’s gun regulations, as the occurrences of mass shootings are typically attributed to easy access to guns. But because of the resistance from Republicans, those measures have mainly failed to advance.
One exception was a law that was adopted in June in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde. Lawmakers worked together to strengthen background checks, help mental health facilities, and give federal money to states that pass “red flag” laws. These laws make it easier for courts to temporarily ban guns from dangerous people.
Critics pointed out that the bill does not ban semiautomatic rifles or require background checks for everyone who buys a gun. Both of these are seen as minimum requirements by gun reform activists, even though politicians have called the law the most ambitious in decades.
US president Joe Biden took advantage of the situation on Wednesday to call on lawmakers to approve laws prohibiting “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” which were similar to that used in the shooting at Sandy Hook.
