Sandy Hook Survivors Graduate High School, Want Gun Control
I remember the day well when news of Sandy Hook broke. I was at my dad’s doing work because the internet was dead at my house. My infant daughter was on the floor playing and I had the news on to keep up with what was happening because, well, I’m a journalist and that’s what goes with the job.
It was heartbreaking, sitting there with my daughter as we learned of so many young lives taken.
Unfortunately, part of my mind was also having to process the fight that was coming. I knew that gun control would once again be a significant topic and some would try to take away our rights due to the actions of one deranged individual.
It’s been a while now since that day. For most of us, the memories have faded, but it hasn’t for everyone. Those who survived that attack are now high school graduates.
Students who survived one of the deadliest school mass shootings in US history graduated high school on Wednesday, as many called for more action on gun control.
Emotions ran high at Newtown high school in Connecticut, more than 11 years after a former student entered Sandy Hook elementary school with guns and killed 20 children – all aged six or seven – and six teachers and staff.
Twenty seats at the high school graduation ceremony were left empty in honor of the children who died in the massacre, which shook the nation.
Many who survived are speaking out against gun violence and calling for more gun control legislation.
In interviews for various news outlets, survivors, who were in the first grade at the time of the shooting, recounted watching their classmates and teachers get killed, and running for their lives.
“We don’t want ‘I’m sorrys’. It’s past that. It’s happened too many times,” 18-year-old Henry Terifay told ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday. “Your prayers honestly don’t mean anything.”
Terifay added: “It’ll never get easier, no matter how many times I talk about it. Honestly, it’s just time for it to change.”
I can imagine.
However, what Terifay doesn’t seem to understand is that there’s absolutely nothing that could have been done to prevent that attack. Nothing at all.
The killer murdered his own mother, took her gun, and then used it to kill all of those innocent children. It’s ridiculous to think he couldn’t have done it with something other than an AR-15, which means had that particular weapon been banned, he’d have just used something else.
What? Were kindergarteners going to take him out if he’d just been armed with a handgun?
And it’s always interesting how every person spoken to by the media who dealt with something like this is anti-gun. I know for a fact that not every survivor of such an incident favors gun control–Ryan Petty lost his daughter at Parkland, for example, yet he and his family still defend gun rights–so why is it always so one-sided?
Did everyone who made it through Sandy Hook become anti-gun, or did some of them recognize that maybe an armed teacher might have saved their friends?
Plus, let’s be real here, as awful as their experience was, it doesn’t change what our rights actually are. I’ve had people say awful things to me off and on my entire life. That doesn’t mean that experience trumps people’s right to free speech.
Others have been traumatized by the ways things went in various churches. Does that allow them to negate someone’s freedom of religion? Of course it doesn’t.
So I’m sorry for what these kids went through, but it doesn’t change our rights. Even if it did, though, it takes a certain degree of delusion to think you could prevent such a monster from killing innocent people.
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