“Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, Vicki Soto, Lauren Rousseau, Rachel Davino, and Anne Marie Murphy—they responded as we all hope we might respond in such terrifying circumstances,” President Obama said on Sunday night at a memorial service for the victims of the Newtown shooting. Those were the names of six of the grownups who died on Friday, along with twenty children, all first-graders. “We know that when danger arrived in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary, the school’s staff did not flinch. They did not hesitate.” He never named that danger in the halls—the shooter, Adam Lanza, or the Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle he primarily used, or the Glock and Sig Sauer pistol he had with him, or the shotgun in his car. The President didn’t use the word “gun” at all. And yet his speech, to a striking degree, was all about guns.
Obama spoke after about a dozen members of the clergy—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Baha’i—and Connecticut politicians; the proceedings started late, because Obama was meeting with the families of the victims. His speech had words of comfort and tribute (“Newtown, you are not alone”) but also of regret. It was the fourth time in his Presidency he had found himself playing the role of a comforter after a mass shooting, he said—“fourth time we’ve hugged survivors, the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims”—and he was tired of it. “We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change”:
It is a mark of how deep America’s gun pathology is that this would sound radical—a speech without any specific policy proposals, whose greatest force came by way of implication, by drawing a line between “Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that.” But in the context of a memorial service, when he might have just spoken about mercy and faith, the speech was a point of departure. After a first term of inaction, it came part of the way toward answering a question that David Remnick and others framed after the President’s brief statement on Friday, in which he talked, with tears, about responding to the shooting as a parent: When would he respond as a President?
On Sunday night, Obama argued that parenting and politicking were not so separate—in terms, that is, of the relation of parents to their own children, and, even more so, of the adults in a country to every child:
“Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?” He asked. “I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s no.” We have not responded—he had not responded—as we all hope we might, in circumstances far less terrifying then those inside that school. Obama relied on one of the great insights of parenthood: children can make you brave, because everything seems less scary than something bad happening to a child. (And really, what does a man who never has to run for office again have to be afraid of?) It was also a reproach: we have to be less fearful in the public realm if we want to protect children at home. In this sense, it was a political speech, and that was entirely proper.
We’ll see what happens. Obama still has to do something other than speak. As my colleague Patrick Radden Keefe wrote, there are many practical barriers to reform, including the number of guns already around. But in some ways that makes it easier, too: when it comes to gun control, it is not as though the low-hanging fruit has all been picked. Our laws are so lax and even absurd—not only those about gun ownership but about where one can carry and whom one can shoot—that even just dealing with the blatant loopholes and most extreme measures will be a start. Not being able to get things to the point overnight where, as Nicholas Kristof put it, gun ownership is roughly as regulated as car ownership, is no reason not to start.
Adam Lanza’s mother, Nancy, seems to have had at least five guns. He took four of them after killing her, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including thirty-round magazines for the assault rifle. The narrative of what followed became clearer this weekend, with accounts of how Hochsprung and Sherlach, the principal and school psychologist, had run toward Lanza after he shot a hole in the school, blasting out the glass by the door to let himself in, before he killed them. (Before the memorial, Obama held Hochsprung’s baby granddaughter.) The intercom was on, and teachers scrambled to get their students into closets, bathrooms, storage rooms, and behind bookshelves, and to keep them quiet. Obama quoted one first-grader who told his teacher, “I know karate. So it’s O.K., I’ll lead the way out.” (They made it.)
But there are some things that we’ll never know for sure, maybe mercifully, like about the last moments—seconds, even—in the lives of Lauren Rousseau and her first-grade students. Lanza killed all of them—the police found, according to the Hartford Courant, fourteen coats, and fourteen bodies. All of the children had been shot more than once.
In the classroom next door, Lanza pointed a gun at Victoria Soto, who was twenty-seven years old, and demanded to know where the children were. She lied and said that they’d gone to the auditorium, according to the Courant’s account; really, she had hidden them in a closet. He shot and killed Soto. When the police searched the room and opened the closet door, “there were seven sets of eyes looking at them,” a law enforcement official told the Courant—all safe. [Updated] What happened, exactly, to their classmates isn’t clear; they may have been found or tried to flee, and there were reports that Soto tried to shield them; a couple reportedly made it to the road. But six were shot dead. A Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic rifle is thirty-two and a half inches long. The median height of a six year old is forty-five inches, and first-graders can only run so fast. At the memorial, Obama said all the children’s names: “Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dillon, Madeleine, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Benjamin, Avielle, Allison.”
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.
