<p>The NRA news conference made me even sadder.</p>
<p>Yesterday I visited the local elementary school where my Ds attended. We donated $$$ towards a school scholarship for college. A small step but hoping others continue their acts of kindness.</p>
<p>JEM, thank you for posting the eulogies for Noah Pozner. They are heartbreaking, but so positive in that they beautifully express the love, hopes, and dreams of a family for its children.</p>
<p>MOWC, what a wonderful tribute. Everyone, please keep on suggesting the small (or large!) acts of kindness we can put out in the world.</p>
<p>Mother of elementary/middle school teacher here.
DS is in his second year teaching. Lives nearby but doesn’t stop in all that often maybe once per week, he’s really wrapped up in his own new life, which is fine.</p>
<p>Tried to call him but got his voicemail a few times…KNOW that he’s affected by this, his Dad did catch him the day it happened on the phone. He was choked up and it was difficult for him to talk. He’ll be here over Christmas, hope he’ll open up then.</p>
<p>I feel so very sad for all the families in Newton and hope they find peace someday.</p>
<p>Let’s not talk here about the NRA proposal. If we do, this thread will be closed.</p>
<p>Cardinal Fang is right. Another moderator and I have deleted several posts today. Please keep this thread on topic, with no discussion of gun control.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I’ll give you a relevant topic for this thread. It’s time for a sober discussion about the rights of mentally impaired persons in this country That will be important to our current view of privacy as regards school records. The violence instigated by Cho, Holmes and Lanza might have been mitigated or prevented if their medical/mental history at school had been exposed to a greater extent than it was.</p>
<p>I agree that mental health policy needs to be looked at. The VA Tech shooter and the Tucson shooter both apparently showed signs of a serious descent into madness, not so much at K-12 school I think but later. So far, I have seen no evidence that the Newtown shooter showed violent tendencies when he was in K-12. He was weird, but lots of kids are weird. I have not read anything suggesting he was violent in high school.</p>
<p>I worry that kids who have developmental disabilities but are not at risk for planned violence-- in other words, the huge majority of kids with developmental disabilities-- will be targeted by such policies. We need to be careful. From what we know so far about the Newtown shooter’s high school career, what policies would we have changed to prevent this horrible tragedy?</p>
<p>Last night while on a road trip we drove through Newtown on I-84 (we live in CT, about an hour away). You could see the area all lit up with the outdoor lights (I thought it looked like our HS when they hold “Soccer Under the Lights”. </p>
<p>I cried for everyone. Both ways.</p>
<p>Fang, honestly at this point I do not know what proposals might be productive AND FAIR. Like you, I fear for the loss of civil liberties because we have a tendency to use a blunt club when what we need is the precision of a scalpel to craft good policy. But something has to change. And it’s not just shootings, as the family of the recent subway victim will attest.</p>
<p>No JM5465, this is the time and the right place.</p>
<p>Now that I think about it, LW, maybe a different thread? Maybe this one is just for us to come together, grieve, and think about acts of kindness? A different thread for policy suggestions?</p>
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<p>I have the same concerns. I wish there were not so many roadblocks when someone sees signs, like with VT Tech or Aurora, but I don’t want to go too far in the other direction, either. We have come so far in de-stigmatizing mental illness and still have a long way to go. The vast majority of those who have mental illness do not abuse the right to privacy. I think there is still so much we don’t know about how to handle mental illness. And while there are many, many true cases of one knowing something was wrong and not being able to act, I wonder how often it is that someone doesn’t really recognize what they have in front of them at the time, and then with the benefit of hindsight insists they knew but were powerless. It has always seemed to me that people have a funny way of downplaying things that are right in front of them because they feel silly and alarmist doing otherwise.</p>
<p>I am involved in two different big online communities, this one and one for people on the spectrum. It is interesting to see the similarities and differences between how the two are coping with this tragedy. The autistic community is mourning the loss of these children so very deeply, just as deeply if not moreso than I am seeing in the neurotypical community. And at the same time, they are waging a war against all these people that are coming out of the woodwork and inferring that they’re all going to be shooters like this someday. The prevalence of this kind of ignorance combined with the knee-jerk response of cutting back privacy laws to handle these problems frightens me. It feels like the beginnings of a witch hunt.</p>
<p>ETA- didnt see posts suggesting keeping this thread just about being sad, or I wouldn’t have responded. cross posted.</p>
<p>Yes, we would appreciate it if you could stick to the original topic. Even mental health issues can start discussion not appropriate for this thread. Those of you who “know” me understand how important mental health issues are to me, but they are not the point of this thread.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>LakeWashington, two threads have already been shut down over the past week due to too much policy discussion. Believe me, if you looked at those threads, you would know that I have very strong opinions on the politics and policy of this issue. But I agree that we should keep this thread more focused on how everyone is coping with the tragedy. We should not make this harder for our fabulous moderators; if we go down the policy path, we will lose this thread as well.</p>
<p>I was just thinking this morning that one of the things that brought me to tears more than once this week was seeing pictures of these kids smiling… and thinking that most of them were not even old enough to have lost their front teeth yet. :(</p>
<p>I agree with intparent - my first response when I heard of the shooting was anger, which was quickly translated into action. But I appreciate this thread and the chance to exchange thoughts and feelings on this tragedy. </p>
<p>I am so sorry for you, DocT. If I had any connection to the families directly affected, I would be overcome with sadness. I would also feel worse if I were close enough to know the town, as you are, cpn55. </p>
<p>I’ve thought a lot about why this particular shooting affected me so strongly. I felt awful about the Gabby Giffords shooting, especially about the little girl who was killed. I felt awful about Columbine and Virginia Tech and the movie theater and mall shootings. And I feel awful about the children killed by crossfire in cities. But this one seems uniquely awful. The children killed in crossfire are killed by accident. The people killed in mall and theater shootings and in the Giffords shooting were killed just because they happened to be there. The people killed in other school shootings were killed by people, usually students, with a connection to the school. But in Newtown, the shooter deliberately chose very young children and their teachers as his targets, and as far as we know he had no connection to any of them.</p>
<p>My 9th grader said today in class, the teacher and kids were all crying after the 9:30 moment of silence. He said what upset the kids the most was when the male teacher lost it, a young father of kids the age of 5-7.
The one dad last night speaking of his son destroyed me, he is a single dad and his boy was an only child.</p>
<p>My emotions have been all over the place, anger, rage, then immense sadness. I think the problem with this one is that it hits close to some of our most basic emotions, children, especially that young, just hit every emotional nerve we have I think. There are few people who can look at a picture of a slain child and not, as Obama said, not think about all the thing that child will never be able to do, to see…children are innocence personified, and while anyone who is killed is a tragedy, when we look at an adult at least we can say they have lived in some way, done things…</p>
<p>Put it this way, there are very few things that will generate a massive physical response in myself, and outside of protecting my own family, it is in seeing a child in harm or one who has been harmed, an ordinarily mellow person turns into the incredible hulk, I have absolutely zero tolerance towards those who hurt children. </p>
<p>The other problem with this is kind of like the response to 9/11, the tragedy is just so out there, it is hard to comprehend it and the evil behind it. </p>
<p>What I am feeling right now is anger mixed with sorrow, and the anger, without getting into specifics, is about feeling like this tragedy should never have happened, it was preventable on many fronts IMO, and that I am very angry about, and also that it is likely after the furor over this passes that very little will be done.</p>
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<p>I think you’re wrong. This event was a tipping point. Things are going to be different now. </p>
<p>Write your Congressman and Senators and tell them what you want.</p>
<p>Without getting into the politics, we have seen tragedies like this already over the past decades, and it has not spurred all that much, the political realities mean that any effort that comes out of these either fails or or doomed to be watered down to death, just look at some of the responses to the shooting in the political and social arena and you will see what I mean.</p>