Ten years in the past in a quiet Connecticut city, a psychotic younger man wielding a military-grade weapon walked into an elementary faculty and murdered 20 first graders and 6 educators. These 20 kids, 6 and seven after they had been riddled with bullets, can be highschool juniors in the event that they had been alive right this moment.
The intervening decade has seen some victories within the sluggish and grinding battle to unravel America’s gun-worshiping loss of life cult. However the awakening has been far too sluggish, too painful. Take your decide of miserable rely: Since Sandy Hook, there have been 189 fatal shootings at American schools; nearly 500 people killed in mass shootings with four or more victims of all kinds throughout the nation; and 400,000 gun deaths.
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Sure, New York and different states handed strict gun legal guidelines within the bloodbath’s wake. The households of Newtown’s victims sued and settled for a lot of hundreds of thousands with the gunmaker Remington for its irresponsible advertising and marketing of its AR-15-style weapons. The corrupt and bankrupt Nationwide Rifle Affiliation has misplaced a lot of its clout. The cretin who broadcast virulent lies concerning the bloodbath has simply been ordered to pay dearly for his defamation. And 5 months in the past, the most important bipartisan gun security advance in a long time turned legislation.
However for all these steps ahead, there’s been pernicious slippage. A reactionary Supreme Courtroom has additional enshrined a near-absolutist proper to hold firearms, making a mockery of the Second Modification. A federal ban on assault rifles stays a dream, as do different overwhelmingly in style measures.
In the meantime, the general public has grown inured to the regular and hole drumbeat of homicide as if it’s each bit as American because the snare they hear beneath the fife on the Fourth of July.
Allison, Ana, Avielle, Benjamin, Caroline, Catherine, Charlotte, Chase, Daniel, Dylan, Emilie, Grace, Jack, James, Jesse, Jessica, Josephine, Madeleine, Noah, Olivia. When the roll is named, voices declare “not right here.” Neither are their lecturers: Anne Marie, Daybreak, Lauren, Mary, Rachel and Victoria. However ever current of their absence is hope in opposition to hope that our violent nation can do the exhausting work to seek out some semblance of peace.
