It’s been a year since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There will be a lot of stories about the trauma, the families, and the state of gun laws since then, so I’m not going to add much to the mix.
Simply put, after all the horror and reflection, nothing has really changed. The state of Connecticut passed tougher gun laws, but on a national level — where the real change has to take place — universal background checks and other attempts to make owning an assault weapon harder than buying a bottle of scotch failed despite the fact that 90% of the electorate, including a majority of N.R.A. members, support them. Call it a failure of will, a victory for the gun lobby, or just a failure. People are still dying, schools are still getting shot up, and Congress is still doing nothing about it.
The tragedy of Sandy Hook isn’t just that a madman killed 26 people. The tragedy is that it happened and nothing happened about it after other than the usual wailing, hand wringing, and and calls for action that meant nothing and went nowhere.
The only thing that has changed for the better is “minor” gun violence that affects children (that is, incidents that are not mass shootings but only kill or hurt 1-2 people) have gotten more attention than they did before. Which is a good thing because most of the epidemic of gun violence are not mass shootings but rather the regular occurrence of these smaller incidents.