Anyone with a heart who remembers the horror and carnage Adam Lanza inflicted on Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012 will not forget it in their lifetime. For some, those who were there or were left bereaved, the event created unfathomably deep psychological scars; injuries that will never heal. They have our prayers for a measure of peace. But the survivors’ suffering does not render their desire to disarm law-abiding citizens inviolable. In fact, they’ve got it exactly backwards: civilians with firearms are the key to protecting innocent souls from murderous monsters like Lanza. Specifically . . .
If one of the teachers or administrators at Sandy Hook had been armed, they may have prevented or at least limited the sickening loss of life. This is not empty posturing by “gun nuts” or predictable propaganda from the NRA. Last year, TTAG conducted scientific simulations to gauge the potential effectiveness of an armed teacher in an active shooter scenario. Click here for our results.
The tests do not unequivocally prove that an armed teacher or teachers at Sandy Hook could have saved the lives of 20 children. No simulation can do that. There are too many variables. That said, a proper simulation at the school could have established the likelihood of that outcome. Newtown residents are not willing to contemplate that possibility; town officials ordered Sandy Hook razed to the ground.
This blindness to common sense – the unwillingness to confront the hard truth about self-defense and spree killing – led to unnecessary gun control laws in Connecticut. Laws that will create still more bloodshed, not less. And yet those who are most deeply affected by the killing continue their crusade (chronicled by newjerseyhills.com) to “strengthen” gun control laws.
Maura Sherlach Schwartz, a Deptford music teacher out of Gloucester County, whose mother, school psychologist Mary Sherlach, was one of six staffers, along with 20 6-year-old children, gunned down by a lone psychopath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
Mary Sherlach had been in a conference with a second-grade student, the student’s mother and Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung when the intruder arrived shooting out a window of the school. Both she and Hochsprung were gunned down trying to protect the students.
Schwartz is still reeling from events in Newtown. “My heroic mother ran to the intruder to stop him,” Schwarz said minutes before Team 26 arrived at Town Hall . . .
“We should be able to walk down the street, go to work, or attend a movie, go to the mall and buy our groceries without the fear of a gun ending our life,” Schwartz told the gathering of about 70, fighting back tears the whole time.
“It’s easy to fall prey to the grief, the frustration, the anger, asking those unanswerable questions like, ‘How did this happen? Why Sandy Hook? Why my mom? What could have been done to prevent this? But the simple reality is, it did happen. And now, we as a country need to learn from it.
So close. So very close. Truth be told, it should have been a defensive gun use.