Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/sandy-hook/)
“A lot of people think when you get shot you go to the hospital, they fix you up, you go home and you’re OK,” she said. “That’s really not the case. Trauma is a roller coaster.” There’s the immediate physical injury and mental and emotional trauma of being shot. But also there are long-haul effects.
Any shooting in a school – like any homicide, suicide, fatality or injury anywhere – unquestionably is a tragedy. For that very reason, we need to stop the self-defeating commentary about gun violence that occurs in schools that hardly tells the whole story: Gun violence in schools amounts to a fraction of gun violence in America. Adults kill more kids than do teen gunmen.
Politicians, media talking heads and others have so fanned the flames on this subject that a Pew poll found that “a majority of U.S. teens fear a shooting could happen at their school.”
The soon-to-be marchers, many of them teenagers, stood in the dark, shivering in the bitter cold, bracing against brutal winds howling off New York Harbor.
In the aftermath of the deadly shooting last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., intense public debate has focused on protecting students – and the role of student resource officers (SROs), in particular – in the event of future shooting sprees. Generally, school resource officers are local law enforcement officers appointed to patrol schools and handle juvenile disciplinary issues. The effectiveness of SROs is highly debated. A National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) report claims the presence of SROs has reduced juvenile arrests in some schools by nearly 50 percent. On the other hand, the Justice Policy Institute issued a report that found SROs had little effect on curbing criminal activity in schools, and may even lead to inflated, and potentially unnecessary, juvenile arrests.
Last Friday 20 children aged six and seven were systematically executed by a young man, who has been politely defined as suffering from a personality disorder, but who in another time would simply have been referred to as a mad man. His baby-killing arsenal included a Glock 9-mm handgun, a Sig Sauer 9-mm handgun and a Bushmaster 223-cal semi-automatic rifle. Our president brushing tears from his eyes, said, “The majority of those who died today were children -- beautiful, little kids … They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.”
“Our hearts are broken.”
The president wept. We, as a nation, mourned. But we as a nation have tolerated a country where gun-related homicide deaths are 20 times greater than any other Western nation.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre Nov. 14 constitutes the second deadliest mass school shooting incident in American history, second only to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in which a single assailant murdered 32 individuals and injured 17 others. With an estimated 26 victims dead -- 20 of whom are children -- the recent massacre is far and away the deadliest shooting incident to ever occur in one of the nation’s elementary schools. Although mass shooting incidents in university and high school settings have occurred in the past, the Newtown, Conn. massacre serves as a rare instance of a perpetrator targeting elementary school students.
On Saturday, Newtown, Conn. officials released the names of the 20 children and six adults slain in last Friday’s shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School. According to initial reports, all of the children killed in the attack were between 6 or 7 years old. State police say 12 of the young victims were female and eight were boys. All six of the slain adults were female.