How To Think About Sandy Hook, Ten Years Later

Newtown Bee — Shannon Hicks

Let’s start with the obvious. There’s no real way to quantify a school shooting; it’s horror. It doesn’t really matter if it’s 3 people shot, or 20 people shot; we tend to like the bigger numbers because we understand that says more horror, which means it’s OK to be glued to the television about it, it’s OK to waste time on the couch consuming as much information as possible. Normally we wouldn’t do this — this is what the shooter wanted, right? They needed to do this because they couldn’t get the attention we all seek in some other, socially-acceptable way? — but when the numbers are higher, we feel more gripped. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t quantify a school shooting. They’re all awful.

Newtown, though, was probably a little more awful. Insofar as anyone fleeing from a semi-automatic gun can defend themselves, the majority of victims at Sandy Hook were quite literally defenseless. Many of them probably didn’t even know exactly what death was at the time they had to experience it. That’s literally crippling to think about in some respects. I’m not a parent, but I would assume once you are, there’s a certain routine to your day/week, just as there would be otherwise; dropping your child off at school, or placing them on a bus, is not supposed to be the end. And if it was the end, it must have been an AM drunk driver, right? Or a kidnapping in a mostly-upscale town? But a school shooting? That makes absolutely no sense.

Here’s the other thing, probably ignored because it seems trivial compared to the scope of everything that happened: Newtown happened right before Christmas. Americans are trained that the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is slower; it’s about family, friends, parties, gatherings, connections, discourses, promises of a new year. It is not whatsoever supposed to be about this kind of thing. Scott Pelley, on a given Dec. 14, should be reporting about some program putting homeless citizens to work in department stores, or on a tree farm run by Vietnam vets. He shouldn’t be doing live shots in front of an elementary school where 20+ were killed.

All this is a long way of saying that what happened in December 2012 is completely unfathomable on almost every level; so the “final report” on what happened wasn’t ever going to offer a ton of closure. There are details of the…