I still remember learning about Sandy Hook. I was trying to run a weekly newspaper by myself at the time, and it wasn't going very well. My daughter was with me as I worked from my dad's house because the office internet was hosed and I just held that little girl tightly.
Unfortunately, I also prayed that the killer didn't get his gun lawfully, because that would just make it easier for anti-gunners. Yes, I felt awful for thinking that in that moment, because it shouldn't be that way, but it's not like the other side even blinks at seizing on politics before we have the facts in. It's hard not to have reactions about the political side because of that.
Now, 13 years later, they're still trying to use that awful tragedy to push legislation.
The coming of the next anniversary of the deadly mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School always leaves U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., feeling, in his words, heartbroken, but also inspired to continue the struggle to pass comprehensive federal gun reform legislation.
Murphy and other members of the Connecticut congressional delegation on Thursday acknowledged supporters of stronger gun laws have had little success in the three years since the U.S. Congress in 2022 passed the widest ranging gun violence bill in decades.
But they pledged not to give up during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol marking the coming 13th anniversary Saturday of the murderous shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, then a history teacher at Kennedy High School in Waterbury, recalled how she grappled in the classroom that day with the breaking news of the shootings at Sandy Hook 18 miles down Interstate 84.
Sandy Hook remains the worst mass shooting in Connecticut history, and ranks as the deadliest shooting at an elementary, middle or high school in U.S. history.
On Dec. 14, 2012, a lone gunman firing a .223-caliber Bushmaster XM15 rifle shot his way into the suburban elementary school and killed 20 first-graders and six educators in five minutes. The 20-year-old mass murderer fatally shot himself after police responded to the school. The killing spree started when he shot and killed his sleeping mother with a .22-caliber rifle.
As a member of Congress representing Newtown 13 years later, Hayes remains determined to pass laws to protect American against gun violence and regulate firearms.
The thing that everyone on the other side of the debate misses is that this twerp was denied for a purchase of a gun of his own because the dealer got the heebie-jeebies off of him. His mother kept the guns away from him, locked in a safe as we want people to do and as anti-gunners want to mandate.
He murdered his own mother to get her guns.
Let that sink in a bit again, in case you've missed it for the last 13 years.
He.
Murdered.
His.
Own.
Mother.
How do you stop that kind of evil? How do you legislate away that kind of darkness? The answer is that you can't.
Plus, he targeted a school with helpless elementary students and their teachers and administrators. It wouldn't have mattered if he had a revolver; he could have killed just as many people because he had absolutely no armed opposition.
But these guys are still looking to capitalize on that awful tragedy to blame guns instead of, say, mentally disturbed young men who would murder their own mothers in order to get a gun so they could murder innocent children in job lots.
That's a kind of evil that won't stop simply because he banned a category of guns. That's a kind of evil that won't stop because you banned guns entirely.
But they're try to leverage the anniversary of something so awful and get stuff done because they don't give a damn about anything other than restricting our rights.
