The scene was all too familiar. Stunned families clinging toone another for support after yet another massacre in yet another pleasant,leafy suburban American community. They came for news at the firehouse near theelementary school, just down the road from the Sandy Hook Elementary school,where a young man had burst into a class and gunned down 26 children and staff.
A couple walked away, shocked and tearful, too stunned tospeak. Others nervously allowed their eight-year-olds to give confused accountsof the killings to the gathering army of television news teams.
But, while the community may seem unique to its residentsand their tragedy unimaginable, the scene that played out has become all tocommon in the United States. It wasn't even the first mass shooting of theweek. On Tuesday another "active shooter" killed two in an Arizonashopping mall. In August, a Wisconsin Sikh temple was targeted and six peopledied. In July, 12 Colorado cinema-goers were gunned down at a Batman premiere.
But school shootings are perhaps a particular horror, andthe recent slaughter will recall for many the 1999 killings at Columbine HighSchool, Colorado, or the mass shooting in 2007 on the Virginia Tech collegecampus. On Friday, December 14, a 20-year-old local entered the school with atleast two handguns and walked into a classroom where his own mother wasteaching a group of under-tens. He opened fire.
Doubtless the latest killings will renew calls for action --tighter gun control, increased school security, tougher laws -- but in Newtownthe parents who descended on the school struggled to explain their feelings.“It is not the right moment to talk," said a young man who lived by theschool, in his twenties, like the shooter.
Instead, locals began organizing vigils and turning out tohelp. Bringing food to the police and state troopers, who arrived at thecommunity school with paramilitary-style gear, Kevlar helmets and automaticrifles. Overhead, the drone of news helicopters almost drowned out the sound ofa police spokesman doling out nuggets of information. But nothing he could havesaid would have explained what happened. Nor why it keeps happening.
