Five years ago, horror in Newtown

They would be in the sixth grade now, but the 20 first-graders never got beyond beginning. They are gone, along with the six adult educators who tried to save them when a 20-year-old gunman burst into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., armed with a military-style assault rifle. He fired more than 150 rounds before killing himself as police closed in.

It happened on Dec. 14, 2012, five years ago today. The school has been razed. The gunman’s home, where he killed his mother before the rampage, has likewise been torn down. But the memory remains, a constant calling from the past to try to prevent such a horror from happening again, as it did and as it will. Just a month ago, a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle attacked Rancho Tehama Elementary School in northern California. One hundred students inside were saved when an alert secretary called for a lockdown.

In the powerful documentary “Newtown,” the father of one of the slain children, David Wheeler, says he keeps his 6-year-old son Benjamin alive in his memory and he is “terrified of forgetting.”

All Americans should fear forgetting Benjamin and the others who died, their bodies shredded by bullets. Yet Americans do forget, and the mass shootings before and after Newtown make it hard to recall the facts of one event, let alone the lives lost or the message echoing in the silence after the carnage.

On this anniversary, Americans should try to remember that scene in Newtown where parents gathered near were consumed by shock and grief as they realized their children would not be coming out to their embrace. And they should remember what didn’t happen afterward in Washington, where those same parents watched Congress fail to take a single step to reduce gun violence.

It was said then that if the murder of 20 children did not move Congress to act, nothing would. And that proved true. Congress, with many of its members in the grip of the National Rifle Association, did nothing then. And it did nothing after the mass shootings that followed in Florida, South Carolina, Oregon, California, Nevada, Texas and elsewhere. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 50,000 people have died from gun violence, including 1,552 mass shootings with at least 1,767 people killed and 6,227 wounded.

Push for gun control

U.S. Rep. David Price, a Democrat representing North Carolina’s 4th District, hasn’t given up hope that the United States may yet reduce the fever of gun violence that is unique among developed nations. Price, the vice chairman of the House Democrats Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, joined 120 members of Congress Wednesday in signing a letter asking the House leadership for a simple step toward sanity on guns – an end to the ban on federal research into gun violence that was imposed at the behest of the gun lobby.

Price joined that request well aware of its futility. He said, “As long as lawmakers are beholden to the gun lobby, I fear that our communities will continue to be exposed to senseless acts of violence and hate.”

The clearest sign of the NRA’s influence is that Congress has failed to act despite popular support for research into gun violence and such basic steps as requiring universal background checks for gun purchases or banning assault-style rifles. If anything is to change before the 10th anniversary of the Newtown shootings, voters who support gun control will need to become as influential as those who oppose it. One way to do that is for gun-control advocates to run for office themselves.

Stonewalling efforts to reduce gun violence should become a losing political position. In North Carolina that’s certainly not the case. Our two Republican senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, each had perfect scores on NRA-backed legislation.

There is no reason to surrender on gun control in the face of “gun rights.” As the Newtown parent Wheeler testified before a Connecticut task force on gun violence prevention: “The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon is second to the right of my son to his life.”

On this anniversary, remember Newtown and refuse to accept that claims of gun rights – backed by heavy contributions from gun makers – can blot out the right of children to grow up and for their parents to grow old with them.

This story was originally published December 13, 2017 at 11:18 AM with the headline "Five years ago, horror in Newtown."