The Lessons of Newtown for the Future of Uvalde
Isla Vista, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, Buffalo: Over the decade since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, scores of American communities have become inextricably linked to mass death. With the killing of 19 children and two of their teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week, the town of 16,000 near the southern border became yet another of our nation’s landmarks of loss.
History suggests that the attention of Americans—overwhelmed, defeated, or distracted by the next outrage—will not linger long on Uvalde. Soon its people will be on their own, to manage reverberating pain. Newtown, Connecticut, knows something about that.
My book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, is about the aftermath of the December 14, 2012, shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown. Sandy Hook was the first mass shooting to spawn viral false claims that the massacre was staged by the federal government as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms. But that was only one of the secondary injuries. Newtown knows how the damage to bodies and lives radiates outward like fallout for years after a mass shooting, scarring a community in ways outsiders do not often see.
