“Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.”
― Charles Bukowski
Do you remember where you were when 20 six- and seven-year-olds were shot in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut? Do you remember the grief and shock as we went through the same motions we always do in the wake of a mass shooting? Intense media coverage, outrage, panel discussions, tweet storms, think pieces? And do you remember the fight by the parents and President Obama to take SOME action, any action that might prevent something like that from happening again? Was the answer to guard schools with armed snipers? Was it to ban assault rifles? Do you remember the NRA’s call to prayer, yet again, accompanied by complete abdication of responsibility, yet again?
The news cycle moved on. Another mass shooting soon came along to draw away national attention. All the while, the parents and other family members of those who perished went through the unimaginable task of grieving for their six- and seven-year-olds. Kim Snyder’s new documentary Newtown reminds us of their grief, of the wounds they are still trying to heal in the aftermath of something you can never plan for, nor ever predict, let alone prevent. The documentary focuses on the survivors and the town as it rebuilds itself, trying to forget, to live on, to find any kind of peace.
Snyder doesn’t politicize the tragedy, choosing instead to draw a portrait of what it feels like to have something like this happen. The parents retelling their own personal stories, specifically their irrational ways of coping, including their dreams of rewriting the events so that they were there, either saving or dying with their children. Those who dealt directly with the tragedy, the emergency staff, the doctors, the church that held the funerals — 20 tiny caskets holding children who were killed in 8 minutes.
8 minutes by bullets so lethal they are built to explode inside the flesh upon impact. There was no way to survive that, especially, as the documentary makes vividly clear, for the fragile, newly formed bodies of 1st graders. There was no way to operate around it. Death was a near certainty. The stories of teachers lunging at the gunman to try to protect the children, other teachers blocking doors, and parents whose kids did make it out all help create in vivid and emotional detail what a day like that can feel like.
Newtown employs an unusual way to tell this story. Ordinarily our focus is trained on the shooter. I have to confess I knew much more about Adam Lanza and his mother than I knew about the victims or their families. Newtown reminds us where our focus should be and reiterates why it should not be on those seeking any kind of infamy for reigning terror upon children or anyone else. Our focus should be on the mother who can’t bring herself to open the boxes and boxes full of gifts for her dead son. The father, who grapples with concern, wondering whether having another kid would be a sign of disrespect or respect for his son. A mom who goes on travels because she can pretend her son is still alive at home.
In these deeply personal stories of still freshly cut grief, we imagine ourselves in the same position. If you’ve raised a child you know that from the moment they’re born your entire mental life will be spent worrying about them. You worry while they’re eating so they don’t choke. You worry about the right foods to feed them. You worry about their mental health, or bullies or abuse, or drowning, or home fires. Your worst nightmare would be having something happen to them when you were not there to protect them. Newtown, no doubt, engraved an immediate and palpable fear in the hearts of Americans who should never forget what happened that day.
Just as President Obama could not stop the tears, those of us watching at home could not stop them either. For all of the news of shootings in this country, day in and day out, there was something about that one. It continues to haunt the president. He could not persuade members of Congress to take even minimal bi-partisan action. Congress turning its back on the epidemic of mass-shootings was a slap in the face to the parents of of slaughtered children, a slap in the face to the president, and an invitation to all sociopaths, disgruntled citizens, and disconnected loners that they could buy an assault style weapon anytime, anywhere and kill a lot of people in a matter of minutes.
We know that by the end, Congress did nothing. Our government did nothing. No action was taken except for the community of Newtown to tear down Sandy Hook Elementary and resurrect another school on the same site in its honor. The Sandy Hook parents are still out there fighting. Our Democratic senators and members of theHouse of Representatives took the unusual action of staging a filibuster and sit-in demanding Congress address the issue. And yet again, nothing was done — not even legislation to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists on the no-fly list.
The excellent website FiveThirtyEight.com has an interactive chart of gun deaths in America. The stat is around 33,000 people who die every year from gun violence. Most are suicides. Many are homicides and many of those homicides are young black men. Among these 33,000, the least number of deaths is a result of from gun accidents. When people say cars kill more people than guns every year that is true. 1.3 million people die a year from car crashes. 800,000 die from heart disease related to foods sold to Americans by powerful corporations. Compared to those numbers, gun deaths may seem like nothing. The problem with these comparisons, however, is that shootings, mass or otherwise, are not a consequence of the victims own actions, and they are not accidents. They are deliberate acts of aggression that continue to terrorize a country already afraid of too many things.
The problem of “gun violence” requires some nuance, as the chart makes clear. Different solutions are needed for different problems. The shooting of unarmed black men in America is its own issue. Suicide is its own issue, although almost every mass shooter is on the path to suicide. They just want to take a lot of other people with them — one final fantasy binge to at last satisfy their sick dream of murdering innocents.
What could have stopped Adam Lanza? He took his mother’s guns she bought legally. She did everything she was allowed to do and supposed to do. She was the textbook “responsible gun owner,” per the NRA’s description. The problem was, she was in deep denial about her murder-obsessed son. He was likely misdiagnosed as having Asperger’s when in fact he was probably a sociopath or experiencing onset schizophrenia. He spent his days alone in his room researching famous mass shootings. He did not play violent video games. He briefly was medicated but went off of his treatment fairly quickly. By all accounts, he was considered really weird, an outsider but no one could have ever anticipated that brewing in his conscious mind was a plan this monstrous .
What could have stopped the Orlando shooter or the Aurora shooter or the Oregon shooter? The Republicans want us — need us — to see Orlando as more terrorism and less lone wolf. But really, the circle is beginning to tighten. How is Dylan Roof not a terrorist? We are all being terrorized by mass shooters, even if they are still relatively rare. We all have the right to live safely, with the peace of mind to send our kids to safe schools and movie theaters and churches.
Lanza, though, would not have been stopped with background checks because he stole his mother’s guns. The only thing that could have stopped him from murdering so many so quickly would have been a ban on assault rifles. If the government can define assault rifles as “weapons of mass destruction” they might be able to put forth responsible gun legislation. But the problem is… well, we all know the problem. The NRA dominates and controls our Republican elected officials and they, in turn, control the legislature. The gun lobby is the most powerful in Washington. It is so powerful, in fact, that our government did NOTHING after 20 six- and seven-year-olds were murdered.
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In 2014, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 children and 6 school employees in 8 minutes with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle and a .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle purchased legally by his mother, a responsible gun owner, who kept them in a locked cabinet.
Other recent mass shootings high caliber automatic weapons, all purchased legally:
2016 — Orlando, Florida — 53 killed and wounded. Assault rifles, handguns
2015 — San Bernardino, California — 14 killed. AR-15
2015 — Umpqua Community College, Oregon — 15 killed AR-15
2015 — Charlston, South Carolina — 9 killed .45-caliber Glock pistol
2012 — Aurora, Colorado — 12 killed Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle, a Remington shotgun and a Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol
There isn’t a mass shooting in recent years that would not have been made less lethal by, at the very least, banning the sale of assault, semi-automatic weapons that can shoot 50 people in under a minute. You don’t even have to be a good shot to kill people with them — you just aim in their general direction of an innocent crowd and the rain of dozens and dozens of bullets guarantees that you will end the lives of many.
We know that the ever-growing paranoia on the right, fueled by fear 24/7 on Fox News and God knows what all streaming out of the internet now, is this idea that citizens need powerful weapons to protect themselves from the tyranny of our government. That is the flimsy rationale they use to block any attempt to ban or curtail the sale of assault weapons, or even enact minimal legislation. People who want these weapons are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of the government. The gun manufacturers don’t care what kind of fear works — so long as they can profit from it.
What then must we do? We have to DO SOMETHING. We have to be willing to try SOMETHING.
As of now, there are 12 times as many civilians walking around with concealed weapons than there are police and detectives. We have an enormous gun problem in America. All too often our debate is about the guns. In that debate, in our outrage and fear, in our helplessness we must never forget that each one of these frequent incidents is much more than another political statistic — each tragic story branches of into dozens of other stories of people who have lost people they loved. Newtown is a film for them.