December 14, 2012

Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crime scene, just a day before, was a school. The medical examiner’s team begins its work through the night to make sure there are no mistakes, no shadow of doubt about the names of those children  – 12 girls, eight boys – along with those of six women shot at close range by a 20 year-old man, whose name everyone now knows.

Later, a state trooper is assigned to each anguished family in close-knit Newtown, Connecticut, as they wait for confirmation of what they already know. And, stunned families all around the world will ask why . . .

Why?

We have been in this place before and again and again.

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It was the morning of March 13, 1996, when the clocks stopped in the sleepy village of Dunblane, Scotland. Teacher, Gwen Mayor, was with her Primary One pupils – just 5 and 6 years old –  in the assembly hall of Dunblane Primary School when the killing began. It was just another Wednesday morning in PE when a 43 year old man on a shooting rampage burst inside, shooting indiscriminately at teachers and children, before turning the gun on himself. His attack lasted three crazed, interminable minutes, during which Ms. Mayor did what teachers at Sandy Hook would do seventeen years later – everything they could to shield their students from the gunfire, to provide shelter from the storm.

There are still no words to help us find a way to explain to our children or to each other how a man could stroll into a school with four handguns and over 700 rounds of ammunition and begin shooting, the carnage coming to an end only after he turned the gun on himself. Seventeen years later, still no words, still no way to comprehend how a young man could kill his mother in her bed, then get in her car and drive to an elementary school where he would kill 20 children and six adults, before killing himself. We know not why. We know only what was done and what was left behind and how it forever changed two tiny places, an ocean apart.

Watching from afar, I am struck by the noblest expressions of humanity that emerge from such tragedies; by the immeasurable kindness of those people Mr. Rogers calls “the helpers.”

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

We can all be helpers, as a heartbroken President Obama reminded us in the wake of the Newtown massacre, because “while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need, to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories, but also in ours.”

The President cried, and we did too. Never again we said.

Never again. Think again.

According to the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group which documents anytime a gun is brandished or fired on school property in the United States, in the years since Sandy Hook, school shootings  have continued – 189 of them.  Seventeen were “active shooter situations” – defined as “when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence.”  279 people have died as a result of being shot on a school campus during, before, or after school hours.  This year alone, over 250 schools nationwide have experienced gun violence.

We can tell ourselves, perhaps by way of coping, that school shootings like these are still statistically rare and that overall our campuses are safer, but the reality is that mass shootings in the United States have become far more frequent – and more fatal.

In a written statement today,  President Biden designated December 14 as a day of remembering, urging each of us to reevaluate our “fundamental principles and if this can be a democracy that protects the most innocent.”  Can it?  I don’t know.  I only know that by the time you read this, the statistics may have changed, that another town somewhere in America will be burying its future.

President Biden is promising again to pass a ban on semi-automatic rifles. His opponents are promising again they won’t let that happen. Far away from debates on why anyone needs a semi-automatic rifle that can fire 30 rounds fast without reloading – the weapon typically chosen by many of those who carried out the deadliest  mass shootings –  I am remembering again Dunblane and those little children who would be all grown up now with driving licenses and jobs, college degrees, marriages, mortgages, maybe children of their own. Like many of us, they would be planning for the holidays, hanging lights, trimming the tree, wrapping gifts, spending too much – all unfulfilled wishes for 16 children taken from us by a former Boy Scout leader with a pair of pliers, four handguns, and 700 rounds of ammunition. A man who slipped into their little school and opened fire.

“So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.” BILLY COLLINS

Victoria Clydesdale, 5

Emma Crozier, 5

Melissa Currie, 5

Charlotte Dunn, 5

Kevin Hasell, 5

Ross Irvine, 5

David Kerr, 5

Mhairi McBeath, 5

Brett McKinnon, 6

Abigail McLennan, 5

Emily Morton, 5

Sophie North, 5

John Petrie, 5

Joanna Ross, 5

Hannah Scott, 5

Megan Turner, 5

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