Imagine you are an elementary school teacher reading Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems to your adorable, wide-eyed first graders and then all of a sudden you hear multiple gunshots, piercing shrieks, and loud thuds. Your first instinct is to ensure the safety of your children. You calmly run to the door to lock it, but just your luck– the door refuses to lock. So, then your second instinct is to hide them. Avoiding causing panic amongst your students, you tell them that you are going to play a game called “We are going into the closet,” and in the end you are rewarded with candy if you are quiet (Larimer, para.7). This scenario may have been a figment of your imagination, but it was a reality for teacher Yvonne Cech and all the other staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
On December 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man, dressed in combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle, shot through Sandy Hook Elementary’s newly installed security system (Barron, para. 1&4). After breaking into the school, he proceeded to shoot the principal and the school’s psychologist (Barron, para 4). In total, he shot and killed 26 people on the school’s campus: 20 of them were children, ranging from the ages of five to ten years old, and the other six were staff members (Barron, para. 1&2). The shooter, who eventually shot himself dead on scene, was later identified to be Adam Lanza (Barron, para. 2). Prior to the school massacre, Lanza killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, who was the legal owner of the weapons, in their family home (Barron, para. 3).
I understand that people possess a gun for safety purposes. After all, the Second Amendment states that “‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’”. However, mass killings in the United States most often have guns involved, generally handguns, which are accessed legally. (Berkowitz, Gamio, Lu, Uhrmacher, & Lindeman, para.3). These killing sprees must come to an end and to do so, we must get rid of the causing factor: guns. Now, I am not saying we have to outlaw guns, but we do need better gun control in our country to prevent further bloodshed such as the one that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut.
Many Newtown families blame Nancy Lanza, Adam Lanza’s mother, for the “schoolroom horror,” claiming that she raised a murderer by neglecting his “increasing instability” (Kuruvilla & Chinese, para.1&2). In a report, “based on a comprehensive examination of the medical and school histories of Mr. Lanza”, Lanza “was ‘completely untreated in the years before the shooting’ for psychiatric and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was also deprived of recommended services and drugs” (Cowan, para.2), but his mother cannot be blamed for what occurred at the school. She was not the one to pull the trigger of the gun; in fact, she was killed by the same gun her son used to slaughter those at Sandy Hook. If you must place blame, place it on the gun. The gun should not have been easily accessible to Lanza. While it is true that Nancy Lanza should be blamed for not guarding her weapons, making them easily accessible to her son, and for neglecting her son’s mental instabilities, my point still stands. If gun control laws were passed and strongly enforced, this calamity would not have happened. Knowing that her son was mentally ill, the state would not have allowed her to possess such weapons.
Take note that Christmas was just days before tragedy struck. Those 20 children that died by gunshot won’t be able to experience the joy of Christmas spirit and open presents from their loved ones. The parents of those who died won’t be able to celebrate Christmas or any other holiday with their little ones ever again (Cain-Jackson, para.9). Just envision those gifts you spent so much time searching for going unwrapped because your darling children will never be able to see what was inside that mystery box. You won’t be able to witness their eyes lighting up on Christmas day ever again because their lives were taken too soon by such a cruel weapon that was meant for protection, not violence. In fact, these parents will never be able to see their child again and they will have to live the rest of their life thinking about their lost child, carrying that grief with them every single day.
The adults nearby the carnage were not the only ones immensely impacted. This tragic event took a toll on all the children present on school campus the day of the shooting. The children who were shot died with their innocence still intact, and in addition, “they had not been exposed to the horrors of the world” (Cain-Jackson, para.9). President Obama addressed this genocide, saying that these children “had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” (Barron, para.20) but now they are stripped of this privilege by a gun. However, those kids who did survive “might not have died but their childhoods have been rocked forever. They will grow up sooner as a result of their loss of innocence” (Cain-Jackson, para.9). These young children will have to live their entire lives with this traumatic and scarring experience replaying in their heads: the sound of gunshots, shrieks, and thuds. The violence must stop.
Not only was our country impacted by this occurrence, but all the rest of the world was mourning with us as well. In an article written by Agence France Presse titled “World Leaders React To The Sandy Hook Massacre,” various world leaders showed their sympathy to all those who were suffering through these tough times. The head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, stated that “young lives full of hope have been destroyed,” (para. 6). The British Prime Minister David Cameron was “shocked and deeply saddened” to hear about the horrific shooting, and “his thoughts are with the injured and those who have lost loved ones. It is heartbreaking to think of those who have had their children robbed from them at such a young age, when they had so much life ahead of them.” (para. 14) Even our long time enemy, Iran, expressed their condolences and their “foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast drew parallels between the school shooting and the ‘children and teenagers who fall victim to armed actions… inside Gaza, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or Syria,” calling on Americans to mobilize against “warmongering and the massacre of innocent people anywhere’” (para. 21&22).
This unfortunate event brought the entire world together and affected everyone–the amount of damage a single gun can do to an entire world is unbelievable. The violence must come to an end. The taking of innocent lives by a gun must stop, and in order to do so, we need to enforce better gun control. We need to limit who we give our guns to. We have to conduct background checks and refuse access to anyone who has a criminal history or a history of mental illness in the family. Doing nothing and standing in silence is not going to get us anywhere. We must take a stand and make an action to end this bloodbath, caused by these misused weapons, once and for all.
Work Cited
Barron, James. “Nation Reels After Gunman Massacres 20 Children at School
in Connecticut.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Dec. 2012.
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Cain-Jackson, Bryan. “Lives and Innocence Lost at Sandy Hook Elementary
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Web. 02 Oct. 2016.
Cowan, Alison Leigh. “Adam Lanza’s Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated’
Before Newtown Shootings, Report Says.” The New York Times. The New
York Times, 21 Nov. 2014. Web. 02 Oct. 2016.
Kuruvilla, Carol, and Vera Chinese. “Newtown Families Blame Adam Lanza’s
Mom for Raising a Murderer.” NY Daily News. NY Daily News, 28 Nov.
- Web. 02 Oct. 2016.
Larimer, Sarah. “In Heartbreaking Video, Sandy Hook Teachers Recall 2012
Massacre: ‘I’ll Never Be the Same’.” The Washington Post. N.p., 14 Dec.
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Presse, Agence France. “World Leaders React To The Sandy Hook Massacre.”
Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 16 Dec. 2012. Web. 02 Oct. 2016.
“The Constitution of the United States,” Amendment 2.
Gun Control: Yes or No? 