A woman sets a stuffed animal at a memorial outside of Annunciation Church, the site of a shooting that took place during a Mass for Catholic school children.Tim Evans/Reuters
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.
Last week’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, with its unspeakable assault on the youngest and most vulnerable members of society, put me in mind of the student massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
At the time, I was a vice-president at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, less than 20 miles away. I was sitting with several other senior administrators at a table in the main dining area of the university – a veritable football field in its proportions – wondering as usual about the content of the animated conversations of the adjacent student-occupied tables. Could it be debates around Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative or T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative that kept them so vigorously engaged? But then, of course, reality set in: it’s a college cafeteria, not a Bloomsbury salon, and the chatter is surely mundane if not ribald in nature. And the large hall was loud, ever so loud.
But then the sound abated. All eyes were on the screens that encircled the hall, screens that carried the usual amalgam of sports updates, film trailers, snippets of celebrity gossip, and a mindless array of commodity promos. But at this moment all the main networks provided onsite coverage of the standoff at Sandy Hook and as the horror set in, the dining hall became solemn.
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The Dean of Education, who sat across from me, looked especially distressed. He jumped up and left in a frantic hurry. Some of his student teachers were either beginning or had just ended class teaching assignments at Sandy Hook Elementary, a school that was rapidly becoming a charnel house. The Education students were not on the list of the murdered.
But that list was growing as we watched the sometimes ghoulish and hyped television coverage, transfixed by the unfolding tragedy. In the end the death tally included 20 first graders and 6 adults, including the principal and school psychologist.
Not to be forgotten in that tally – in spite of some of the media determined to exclude them – was Nancy Lanza, the mother of the perpetrator Adam Lanza. Nancy was shot in her bed prior to her son’s attack on the school. After the carnage, and under siege, Adam took his own life. The final tally: 28 dead.
The Sandy Hook killings constituted a new level of atrocity. There had been school shootings before but this was a hideous development: elementary students.
The country rallied around the survivors and the families of the victims, until they didn’t. Within a very short time conspiracy theories emerged questioning the facticity of the massacre – Alex Jones, the founder of InfoWars, was the primary purveyor of the most outrageous charges levelled against the parents and others he saw as complicit in a manufactured lie. (Mr. Jones was finally held to account a decade after first surfacing his deranged conspiracy allegations.)
The school building was eventually demolished. As the years passed, Newtown struggled to recover something of its pristine reputation as a respected redoubt for Connecticut aristocracy and arcane social conventions dating back to the immediate post-Revolution period. Understandably, the memory of that horrific crime remains seared in the local consciousness to this day.
But did anything change?
Chris Murphy, a House of Representatives member from Connecticut, was quick to push for more robust gun control, and in this advocacy work he was supported by Newtown First Selectman Patricia Llodra. In May 2013, Sacred Heart University bestowed an honorary doctorate on Ms. Llodra for her tenacious work seeking gun regulation in a country pathologically attached to them. At the reception following the convocation, I asked her what she thought the chances were that the enlightened proposals for gun control supported by the governors of Connecticut and New York, with the ardent backing of president Barack Obama, would achieve federal legislation.
She said there was no chance of success. Even the killing of babies in their cots would not result in change. There was no political will for that to happen.
But Mr. Murphy, soon to be elected the junior senator from Connecticut, would not be dissuaded. He has continued to call for changes to U.S. gun laws ever since. Following the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 he wrote: “To my colleagues, your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers. None of this ends unless we do something to stop it!”
But nothing is ever done to stop it. The calls for action in the wake of the Annunciation murders will reach their crescendo in the coming weeks, and then they will subside, the outrage diminishing in pitch, the normal pattern reasserted.
Until the next time.