Sandy Hook was one of the most horrific massacres in my lifetime, and we’ve seen far too many during that span.
The idea of targeting children like that disgusts me on a visceral level. The idea that the killer wanted to get some kind of high score or something, which drove his target selection, is even worse.
But unfortunately, too many of the survivors of that horrific ordeal haven’t really considered the reality of what led to that incident. That’s clear with this piece where one who claims to have survived the attack espouses support for gun control candidates.
While her teacher read from The Nutcracker to keep the class calm, Grace Fischer could hear a man in the next room murdering her friends with a semi-automatic rifle. She was six years old.
This summer Fischer turned 18, graduated from high school and moved away from Sandy Hook, her sleepy Connecticut hometown, whose name remains a byword for America’s gun violence problem 12 years on.
But it feels to her that the most momentous landmark is still a few weeks away.
On November 5 she will cast a vote in the presidential election along with eight million other first-timers — peers that make up the “school shooting generation” who reached adulthood in the long shadow of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre and the dozens like it that followed.
“I’ve been campaigning for gun control for years, but there’s only so much change you can affect without a vote,” said Fischer, who lost 26 of her friends and teachers. “We’ve worked so hard only to see what happened to us happen to others. We need those in power to know enough is enough.”
First, I’m going to point out that polls looking at voters priorities show that gun control isn’t at the top of anyone’s list, so I doubt the fact that the so-called school shooting generation is voting for the first time is going to change much of anything.
But the individual quoted survived Sandy Hook and has pushed for gun control. That’s not uncommon.
It’s just dumb.
Let’s look at what transpired that horrible day.
A disturbed young man killed 26 people. He did that with a gun, an AR-15 to be exact. That’s why people seem to think gun control is the answer.
However, let’s remember that first, the killer tried to buy a gun. He was denied by the dealer.
He then murdered his own mother to gain access to her properly stored firearms, then used those to commit an atrocity against a school that had no armed teachers, no school resource officers, or anything short of a law that banned guns on the premises and maybe a sign warning people of the law’s existence.
Had there been no AR-15s in existence, that maniac would have killed just as many people with a handgun or two. After all, that’s what happened at Virginia Tech just a few years earlier, which is still the worst school shooting in modern American history. That’s because gun control laws made sure there was no chance of armed resistance, but did nothing to actually stop a murderous heart from carrying out a horrific plan.
Wanting to do something to make sure no one experiences what you experienced is one thing. Ignoring the reality of what led to what you experienced so you can push for more of the policies that failed? That’s not something that can just be brushed aside.
