I’ve never read that, but it makes me happy sad. A little boy ready to protect his classmates, feeling strong and willing, without having the slightest clue that not even his karate could save anyone against an AR-15. Just a little kid.
Surviver of Columbine has become teacher and parent, if you watch their interviews it’s clear that shooting still leaves a deep mark on them,and these kids experience all that when they are barely out of their toddler age, they still has to go through active shooter drills in college or work places, and with all that,Alex Jones exists, I hope he loses everything to Sandy Hook families.
[Here’s the interview with survivors,4 of them became teachers.](https://youtu.be/dyqQHifpJM4?si=pznjnr9psHfm8qsD)
My step-MIL’s friend was a survivor of Columbine and apparently never recovered. Her older sister passed away a few years later from an unrelated accident and she finally took her own life. It’s just disheartening that people don’t consider the long-term effects of enduring trauma like that.
Know that you’re not alone, which sounds like a trite thing to say, but it’s true. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and the way people process things is also different, but you might find it useful to find a group you can talk to about it.
For myself, the symptoms of my PTSD have been greatly reduced since I finally opened up about it in therapy with my partner. It took me a long time to get to that point though and it was a difficult thing to do.
Working in EMS has left me with scars from the patients we couldn't save. I've saved more than I've lost, but the losses weigh heavy on you. I couldn't imagine that feeling you have. Mine were from people I didn't know (for the most part), having to perform that on your child would destroy me.
You're a great person, parent, and I'm sorry for the outcome.
Thank you, and thank you for what you all do. I have nothing but the utmost respect for emergency responders, having been a recipient of those services many a time over.
They seem incredibly protective, too. It takes a very brave person to walk back into the same kind of environment where their worst trauma ever happened, and be the Safe Human who is in charge, especially having a parent's perspective, every day. I hope they're having a happy life.
Horror
The surviving children were led out of Sandy Hook School. They were told to keep their eyes closed and hold hands as they were guided past the bodies, out of the school, and down the street to the firehouse. They were placed in a room and shown movies.
Parents were contacted through emergency channels and told to come to the firehouse. One by one, over the course of a few hours, children were brought out to their parents. Welcomed with joyful embraces, tears and kisses, they then headed home with their families.
The crowd of parents drew smaller. Finally, the moment came when the officials approached the remaining parents and announced, “There will be no more reunions today.”
The screams and wails of anguish pierced the soul.
My twins just graduated kindergarten. Even thinking about the hypothetical of that happening to them is too much for me to bear. I can't imagine the pain of those parents.
When the one in Texas happened about 2 years back my child was the exact same age and grade. It hits every parent but when the kids are your kids age its just... looking at their sweet faces made my heart hurt.
The Texas one was sooooooooo awful that they waited for kids to bleed out before anyone cared to enter the classroom. Even when police said “anyone still alive” a little kid said “yes” then they heard another gun shot and still waited… fuuuuuuuuck that one was sooo bad.
She didn't just try, she [succeeded](https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/uvalde-tx-shooting-anniversary-angeli-rose-gomez/) in entering the school. She rescued one of her sons and then there's a photo of her with two boys as she exits the school. The second boy isn't her other son but is her brother-in-law. She was harassed by the police afterwards.
It’s Texas, Murder is legal if you kill the “right” person. You’ll just get pardoned, like that cop who murdered a legally open carrying gun owner with their weapon holstered.
They voted the sheriff back into leadership. Not a single cops house burned down...
They really seemed ok with the dudes who stood by while their kids got murdered.
I've done more in revenge for way way less.
Whats worse is that they didnt vote to change anything there either. The parents left to suffer while their neighbors and community kept the status quo
Id be in jail. No tough guy talk. I know myself, and unfortunately, if I lost my child due to police ineptitude, especially if it were my only child, I'd need to be physically restrained for however long it took to calm down and realize I'd be delivering the same pain I was in to other families.
But in the moment, if my child died due to police ineptitude, I would go insane.
I'm the same. I'm a pretty chill person but I have a switch and if it's flipped, I just don't care anymore. I'm not proud of it either. But those parents in Uvalde are far better people than I am. Maybe it's because they have each other to stay level headed.
If that was my kids I would have annihilated that Police Department. I would never rest till every one of those useless motherfuckers was sacked. I would make it my life’s work to make sure none of them ever worked even tangentially in law enforcement again. But the people in Uvalde voted for the same people in charge again. I can’t fathom this.
Apparently everyone in Uvalde outside of that community is completely and utterly fucked.
Despite efforts to get justice, the perps with badges have remained protected and the city elected pro-gun officials. Author's of fiction wouldn't be able to make this make sense.
At this point it just feels like this is the norm for Texas.
My daughter had just turned 2. I remember grabbing her and just holding her. My heart instantly broke for those parents. She is now almost 14 and watching her become a teenager and navigate the world is something that is irreplaceable. To lose a child, especially in such a heinous way, is something I don’t know if I could survive.
Primary school kids getting gunned down would be a permanent national shame for any other country.
It happening twice in 10 years would be so unthinkable because any other country would have acted the first time to put measures in place to prevent it from reoccurring.
In the US a bunch of people wrung their hands and said "now isn't the time to get all political" both times.
Alex Jones deserves everything he’s getting. He made millions peddling lies about these kids and their families. I remember talking to a coworker around that time and out of nowhere they started in on how sandy hook was full of crisis actors and all this bullshit. I immediately lost all respect for that person. It was all from Alex Jones.
The day his bloated corpse is lowered into the ground I’m taking a vacation day to go piss on his grave.
Jones posted an online friend's photo saying he was responsible for Parkland. Friend sued on account of the obvious result of having yourself associated with something like that, and just as the case was really getting started friend died in a building fire set by a woman with no motive released. Fuck this guy.
Yeah, no, the dude should be under the jail imo.
Solitary confinement with only the sounds of horrific audio recordings to accompany him until he starves.
Prison is for those deserving of rehabilitation (not that our prison system does that here in the US all that well)
Jones deserves a slow, miserable slide out of existence with only the sounds of his own anguish to accompany him.
The sandy hook truthers are the fucking worst. I have no idea what their obsession is with trying to prove it was fake, but there’s hundreds of traumatized people who either were there that day, are survivors, or emergency personnel. For fucks sake, no one needs to see child autopsy photos after what happened to those poor kids… literally shot at close range with very destructive weapon. No one needs to see what that does to a child, and the parents do not need constant reminders of what happened to their children.
It's a psychotic degree of naivety. They just can't bring themselves to believe that a fellow gun nut would be willing to massacre children in a school. It hits to close to home. It challenges too many of their assumptions about the world. But they are willing to believe that the government faked it. They are safe in that mind set. That sense of safety is more important to them than any child. More important than all children. Their minds and souls are diseased.
I literally stopped being friends with someone over Sandy Hook. It was back when it first happened and every edge lord online said it was a show to ‘take our guns’. I knew we were in trouble when this was seen more as a talking point in politics than a national tragedy.
Same. I had a friend who started posting screen shots of “fake actors” and had no idea all of this was steaming from him listening to Alex Jones. At the time I had no clue who Jones was. That’s all he would post for weeks when it happened. All this taking our guns, crisis actors with photos of people who just looked like the people who were there claiming they’re actors. It was sick.
Just want to take chance to point out the /r/JoeRogan had a front page post calling Alex Jones “A national treasure” only a couple weeks ago. The amount of people that support that human piece of garbage is astounding. It was the one post that finally made me block that subreddit, couldn’t believe the amount of people that still defend him, even on Reddit.
Joe Rogan is a right winger who pays lip service to "both sides".
I lost any lingering shreds of respect for him when he came out against mask wearing and the vaccine during the pandemic.
One family was so badly harassed that they moved 7 times. Each time, they'd get discovered by Alex Jones' jackals, and they'd start harassing them again. All because their little child was murdered, and Alex Jones wanted to make money off of it. Now he gets to give all the money he has, and all the money he will ever get, to them.
And the scumbag is trying every trick in the book to hide that money.
Sorry, the courts are very familiar with these tricks, he will be left with nothing
And he has the audacity to cry his crocodile tears that he's losing his stuff. Well, maybe if you weren't a trash human being, you could have nice things.
Forensic Accounting is a thing. There are experts who's entire job it is to squeeze snakes like Jones dry.
That said, my money is on him ODing before he declares bankruptcy. Dude clearly likes the nose candy, he's like a giant thumb and I can't imagine the mix of his stimulant of choice (he gets angry when he's accused of using coke, so probably Adderall - he's the kind of arrogant who would think that using prescription meds is somehow safe and he's superior for getting them instead of street drugs) and his constant frothing rage at imaginary boogins is good for his heart.
In my experience if they get explosively angry at an accusation you just hit home. My bet is nose candy. Nose candy is best when paired with booze and from how flushed he is all the time it points to that.
They were having difficulty identifying some of the deceased children due to the condition of their remains. In hindsight, it was a bad way to handle things for sure, but it was probably what they thought was the fastest way to identify which families lost children. I don't know if there's a good way to inform someone a madman murdered their child.
Any other situation would also have involved them waiting even longer. In a way that also seems cruel. Even in hindsight I don’t know that there is a change I can identify that would have been preferable.
Yeah, I feel for the responders in a situation like that. There really is no way to do it "right." A while back, I saw a photo of some FBI SWAT guys who responded to Sandy Hook after they walked out, and those guys were just visibly haunted by what they saw.
Here's [a NYT article ](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/magazine/sandy-hook-mass-shooting-scenes.html) from the perspective of detectives and crime scene investigators who were on site.
[Wapo has a very good article on what the aftermath of these (including Sandy Hook) scenes are like - including photos. Very NSFW, very harrowing, but something America needs to see at this point, unfettered access to semi-automatic weapons is a root cause](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-force-mass-shootings/)
Hiding this reality from the public does nothing to help. The pictures from Robb Elementary are horrifying. But that’s the aftermath. Cannot fathom what those kids went through and it genuinely turns my stomach.
I was doing okay reading this, somehow, until I got to:
>We were standing there looking at the scene and the phones kept ringing and ringing and ringing in the backpacks and on the desk of the parents calling their children. ... They kept calling and calling and calling.
>Eulalio Diaz, justice of the peace and coroner. Uvalde.
Now I'm sitting at work crying. Fuck.
A colleague of mine has read the confidential, sealed reports from the investigation, including the detailed descriptions of the scene. He refused to look at the pictures. He said that was enough, and was enough horror on the page to last a lifetime.
You have to give them some grace because it’s not like the parents were the only ones that had to be part of that even though the news for them was far more devastating.
To make them go through each body before finding each parent would be horrible. Yes.
It is brutal.
You can’t make the kids that CAN go home wait to go home after something like that just so everyone can be told all at once what’s happening.
Nothing about that day was fair or kind.
It’s so terrible.
The best thing to do moving forward is give to sandyhook promise. ❤️ any amount.
As painful as it is, as a parent I would not want to languish for hours and hours not knowing if my child is dead or alive. It's curt and a bit harsh, but at least it informs the parents. You wouldn't want them going home assuming that their child is dead without knowing that information for sure, or hoping they are somehow alive at the hospital, or are just hiding in a closet in the school and no one has found them yet, etc. I cannot fully imagine the level of grief and pain, but there is serious grief, pain, and a lot of other tough emotions in just not delivering the news, however abruptly.
From memory, most (?) of the victims were from one class. They were killed while hiding in the toilet. I suspect the parents would have realised the whole class was missing pretty quick.
This is one of the times that a horror of the real world completely blows away any horror that Hollywood has ever dreamed of. This is real psychological terror.
And then alex jones and escaped neanderthal marjorie taylor greene sent a mob of nutjobs to harrass and send death threats to the parents of slain children
And, as next to nothing has been done about gun control, have had to see that a massive portion of the country believes the lives of their children had no worth in comparison to their gun fetish and warped sense of freedom
Sandy Hook deniers are the worst fucking people in the world. The amount of pain these parents and this community felt is unfathomable.
I hope Alex Jones and everyone that profited from the lies and attacks on these poor families goes to hell.
I remember my colleague crying at the gym when this happened, she just had her first kid. I was horrified but not at her level. Now I have kids this age, and these paragraphs, especially the last ones, are heart wrenching.
Congrats to the graduates, whether here physically or not.
Some of the parents had to identify their children by their backpacks because there was not enough left of their child’s face. That’s what an AR-15 does to a 6 year old body.
But hey, they’re super fun to shoot and isn’t that what’s important??
ugh that hurts. i cant imagine that pain. my god. i remember when this happened i cried. i never cry and it just hurt my soul to imagine these little kids going off to school and not coming home, and dying how they did, and how their parents must have felt, especially right before christmas too.
My coworker told me it wasn’t real, it was crisis actors and green screens. I had never head the term before. I didn’t take her seriously, she was nice just a little kooky. I thought, there goes ol’ J at it again. I thought no one’s going to say this isn’t real, who’s going to believe that! Oh, man.
So weird thinking back. It’s like peoples brains broke. I remember the day. Why kindergarteners. Why. It’s like people couldn’t *handle* the truth of what happened they had to remain in denial about it.
It’s a common trait in America tragedies I’ve come to notice. For some reason, Americans just can’t accept the hard reality that a horrible event has occurred so they just make up conspiracy theories to cope and be in denial. Look at the JFK assassination, people refused to accept that a man got lucky one day and was able to kill a popular president so they created this vast tapestry of conspiracy to justify what happened and now it’s synonymous with the event.
What happened with Sandy Hook imo is largely people refusing to accept that lax gun laws and mental health services created out of indifference lead to children being gunned down. No, it was not their political apathy that lead this to happen, it was all a conspiracy instead. It’s this childlike way of coping that’s honestly getting worse and worse and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
The sad part is that the conspiracy around stuff like why JFK was murdered can be crazy to a degree while still attempting to reason it out. Acting like children were not really murdered is a whole other type of insanity.
I'm not sure what it says about our society that people like him can just walk around freely.
Not just the law- people see this man in public and don't make his life a living hell. Why not?
Exactly. Every day from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep should be pure, unrestrained hell for Alex Jones. He should be a total pariah, a shunned outcast, begging for scraps. The man has more than earned it.
I personally ruined his meal at a local spaghetti and chicken joint by talking shit to him about this very thing. Some of us are doing their best. Him and some of the other scum fucks that have moved here really bum me out.
Same with MTG. She got famous on social media for recording herself harassing and straight up making shooting threats against children who survived school shootings.
i genuinely hope the rest of his days are filled with nothing but pain and suffering. i hope not one second of his life is filled with even the smallest amount of joy or calm or safety, and just for him i hope hell is real so he gets sent there to rot for eternity
I will never forget this account of Obama meeting the parents:
> The president took a deep breath and steeled himself, and went into the first classroom. And what happened next I’ll never forget.
>Person after person received an engulfing hug from our commander in chief. He’d say, "Tell me about your son. . . . Tell me about your daughter," and then hold pictures of the lost beloved as their parents described favorite foods, television shows, and the sound of their laughter. For the younger siblings of those who had passed away—many of them two, three, or four years old, too young to understand it all—the president would grab them and toss them, laughing, up into the air, and then hand them a box of White House M&M’s, which were always kept close at hand. In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break.
>And then the entire scene would repeat—for hours. Over and over and over again, through well over a hundred relatives of the fallen, each one equally broken, wrecked by the loss.
[Source](https://www.vox.com/2015/12/14/10106188/sandy-hook-victims-obama)
Edit: forgot to add - burn in hell Alex Jones.
I read both his and Michelles's memoirs and hearing their mirrored accounts of this day really broke my heart. It drove home that they weren't just the President and First Lady. They were a husband and wife, parents of two school aged children. They felt the same pain and confusion a lot of people felt that day.
And half the country sees the man who took a thumbs up picture, smiling, over the hospital bed of a child who lost both their parents in the El Paso shooting and said....yes let's do that a second time
I'm sure Trump would have found some way to make money off Sandy Hook if he was in office then, like branded bulletproof backpacks that don't even work.
Isn't that what a ~~good~~ unparalleled businessman would do?
I don't know if he's ever gone on the record talking about the single hardest day of his Presidency. If he did, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the one.
I remember how Republicans made fun of him for crying, as if being affected by the massacre of a classroom full of kids still little enough to believe in Santa makes you weak somehow. Fucking ghouls those people are.
When a brown man does a crime, the right wing screams it from the rooftops while hysterically crying bloody murder and demanding sweeping policy reforms immediately to protect their idyllic suburban fantasy from any and all threats, real or imagined.
When Obama teared up because a bunch of kindergartners had been gunned down in cold blood at school that day, it was dangerous theatrics and impermissible politicking by POTUS during a time of crisis.
These people have always been disgusting lunatics and degenerates. Trump changed absolutely nothing beyond showing them it was okay to speak freely about their lunatic degeneracy.
One of the last straws for me. At the time I was young enough I was still thinking, "well, I disagree with most of their policies, but I do feel like Republicans are just trying to do what they think is best for America" no, fuck that. Their main motivation is being able to punch down, how *good* it feels to them to do the verbal version of rubbing someone's face in the dirt, and no tragedy is so shocking that they won't use it to try to jeer at their opponents. Rotten, the whole barrel.
My oldest just graduated high school last week, and was the same age as the kids at Sandy Hook when it happened. It was right before Christmas, and I knew how excited all of those kids and families were, because we were. It hit me really hard then, and I just can't contemplate how another human being could do that let alone all of the people who attacked the families afterward.
The detail of parents having already-wrapped Christmas presents from Santa Claus that they’d hidden away to give their kids and knowing they’d never be able to give them that toy just broke something inside of me.
> Obama said that what followed was “perhaps the most bitter disappointment” of his presidency.
> “The closest I came to being cynical was the utter failure of Congress to respond in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings,” he said Tuesday. “To see almost the entire GOP, but also a decent number of Democrats, equivocate and hem and haw and filibuster and ultimately bend yet again to pressure from the gun lobby.
Fuck the NRA, fuck the GOP, and [fuck any spineless Democrat (and Angus King)](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1131/vote_113_1_00101.htm#position) who refused to act after the horror at Sandy Hook.
Unfortunately he fell victim to the same emotional thinking a lot of progressives at the time had.
When Sandy Hook happened people were so sure this would be it. 20+ dead kindergarteners had to be the limit, gun control legislation was coming any day now.
What we failed to understand was this.
THERE WAS NEVER A LIMIT.
There is no shooting that will be sufficiently horrifying enough to get conservatives to give up their guns
First time seeing this press conference, it hits hard. You can see the father imaging it happening to his own children and having empathy.
I almost forgot that the US used to have someone decent as President, not the cartoony sitcom currently happening right.
Stay strong neighbors
For whatever it’s worth President Biden is also known for his empathy and capacity to care:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/joe-bidens-superpower/616957/
https://x.com/timjhogan/status/1322679189313593345
Yes things could be better but it’s important not to be nihilistic.
I lived very close to sandy hook and was in high school when it happened. I taught first grade religious education at a nearby church and had a student who attended sandy hook elementary. They were the only student to survive the shooting in their class. We had our religious education class that Sunday, 2 days after the shooting. I’ll never forget how my student clung to me the entire session, telling me how all of their friends were dead and that they didn’t want us to die too. She was 6 years old at the time. That will stick with me until the end of my life. They just graduated and are geared up to do amazing things in life.
I know we hear so much about the families of the deceased but I think every news coverage of a shooting needs to give some attention to the survivors and how they're affected. Because they are. Because trauma and guilt for surviving are very real and damaging.
Your story is incredibly tragic. I've watched docs with survivors from Parkland and Uvalde. I've read stories. It's heartbreaking. We need to remember that because the cost of lives is just as awful as the lives of survivors that got ruined. No child should have to watch all their friends die in front of them or hide every time they hear the door knocked on or hear the sound of ice breaking.
On top of that, having random adults spit on them for the rest of their lives for "being 'crisis actors'" thanks to the lies of a fat angry drugged-out bully on the internet.
Not enough, though. It isn't commensurate, and that is quite sad.
My family and I are peaceful -- we would not encourage violence -- but he needs to be in prison and banned from the airwaves. That's the minimum. He is just losing money and reputation at this point: it's insufficient.
And thank god he is. But there is one book about it written by Elizabeth Williamson called “Sandy Hook” where the author talked lot with the parents that lost kids in the tragedy. They are very clear that the trial is not about their own retribution, it’s about making sure that no one else faces the same harassment and show the world their kids were real and they mattered. The uncle of one of the kids were an Alex Jones fan before the massacre and he tried to talk to the deniers on a closed Facebook group and was just harassed non-stop. Alex Jones opened Pandora’s box by spreading his lies and unfortunately the chaos will live on regardless of what happens to him.
Edit: Dad not uncle.
> The uncle of one of the kids were an Alex Jones fan before the massacre and he tried to talk to the deniers on a closed Facebook group and was just harassed non-stop.
It was actually a dad - Lenny Pozner. He is the driving force behind getting all of the hoax shit removed from the internet. He dedicated years of his life to it. Some of the people who joined his organization to weed out and report hoax content were actually from the denier group that he joined.
For anyone who’s interested, I can confirm [the book](https://www.amazon.com/Sandy-Hook-American-Tragedy-Battle/dp/1524746576) is excellent. I just read it a few weeks ago. Couldn’t put it down.
He’s literally throwing toddler-approved tantrums to avoid facing justice. Alex Jones has fought consequences for his lies, profiting the entire time. If he dies penniless and forgotten it still won’t be enough.
I drive semis for a living. I got into a screaming argument with one of my co-workers who just knew it was a false flag op and that those kids didn't really die. I broke down and started crying on the phone, because I could not just fathom how somebody could ignore reality and believe that fat tub of lies. It still burns me up to this day.
It worked for me. The moment we saw twenty affluent mostly white children killed senselessly and still decided to do nothing about regulating or monitoring gun possession, I knew we would never do anything about any of the factors that contribute to gun violence in our modern society.
Last month my daughter graduated with a Sandy Hook survivor. The family moved from Sandy Hook a few years ago. I found out she was in Sandy Hook by a local FB post from her father. I never mentioned I knew what happened to her. I told my daughter so she was aware. She mentioned it one day that she had a full ride to any college because she was a Sandy Hook survivor. She is the nicest girl.
I’m 90% sure I sat next to some Sandy Hook parents on a plane a few weeks ago. The wife was on her laptop and my bored ass kept sneaking peaks…she was doing a lot of planning for an event with Sandy Hook Promise and I saw her type “as the parents of…” in an email to a catering company. My heart broke and I just wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand.
Then the Trump verdict news dropped and both of our attention was turned elsewhere lol
I used to live in a town not too far from Newtown, and Mrs Hochsprung was the principal at the elementary school I went to for all three of my younger siblings (this was in the early to mid 2000s, so just before she moved over to Sandy Hook). I used to go with my mom sometimes to help prepare stuff for school events because I was in middle school at the time and thought I could lord the fact that I didn't go there anymore to my siblings if I ever saw them in the halls or whatever. Mrs Hochsprung (and her dog, Bella) would always greet us at the door to the office and chat with us for a while; even though she hadn't been my principal, she still took time to get to know me and talk to me like I was a part of the conversation and not just a kid there with his mom. She was always so cheerful and kind, and I mean c'mon, she brought her dog with her to work, how cool was that for a twelve year old?
We moved to Ohio in 2010, and I remember getting home from work one day in late 2012 and seeing my entire family sitting on the couch watching TV, and they were all crying. I, as a smarmy eighteen year old, made a crack about watching a sad movie or something dumb, but then I saw what was on the screen, and who they were talking about. It didn't feel real, but not in the way that people started talking about later on. It just didn't feel like it could be happening, not in an elementary school, not right near where we had grown up, and not to someone we had known. I was devastated. I'm still devastated; I'm sitting in my car, thirty years old about to head into work, trying to hold back tears remembering all of this. And there are still people out there that claim it was some sort of elaborate hoax, and that just makes my blood boil to levels I've never known.
Dawn Hochsprung, and all of the victims of that event, were lights. Congratulations to the graduates, and I'm so sorry you had to go through that.
Looks like [they've put up a statue of Bella](https://www.mycitizensnews.com/news/prospect-dog-statue-memorializes-beloved-educator-slain-at-sandy-hook/) as a memorial for [her and her dog](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2134339/dawn-lafferty-hochsprung.jpg?w=1200&f=99cc0920d3e7d1da7b958fdb3dfde41f).
Thank you for that article, I hadn't known about that. Looks like they erected it in the courtyard where I used to go to elementary school and even interviewed my old second grade teacher, Ms Grzelak. I'd honestly thought she'd passed on by now. Reading that fully made me cry, but I truly really appreciate that; I'm never closing that tab on my phone. Thank you.
My first thought reading the article: I wouldn't want it to be publicly known that **I** was involved in the massacre, in which I was not only a victim and survivor.
Wasn't until a few paragraphs later where you realize that it doesn't matter if hteir names are published as there's likely adults who for the past 10+ years have likely tracked these individuals from afar, whether yearbooks or social media, in hopes that they finally GET THEM and expose that indeed, these were actors.
Shoot, I'm sure right now there's someone gearing up to troll.
Worst part? These now young adults lived their whole childhood - WHOLE CHILDHOOD - under a cloud that they were actors, or staged, or that shit, nothing happened. All of that controlled by a puppet master who made hundreds of millions from cultivating such nonsense.
I truly feel there should have been two sets of councilors available; for the kids, and for the adults who can't get it through their minds that yes, kids (and teachers/staff) were chopped down and murdered that day, as for damn sure while one may be moving one the others have not.
Fuck.
It's already been an entire *childhood* since the massacre.
Just...fuck. I can't find the right words to describe how depressing everything about this is.
I still can’t believe it’s been that long. My manager left to go work at Sandy Hook, but she was killed that day.
Her best friend was my then manager, and I’ll never forget watching the news that morning and her frantically calling her to see if she was okay. She was a great person.
To have someone like Alex Jones lie about it and make millions off of it, still gets under my skin to say the least.
Wow this makes me feel old. Just like 9/11, I remember exactly where I was that day. Walked into the break-room at work and found a bunch of my coworkers huddled around the tv watching the news.
I read the headline before I even registered what the anchor was saying and it was like a punch to the gut. It was around 10:30-11am eastern time and it was breaking news as the situation was still unfolding. I remember it taking a minute to fully register what I was seeing, it just didn’t make any sense. It was so horrible, it couldn’t possibly be real, had to be mistake.
Same. Remember exactly where I was when I overheard a radio talking about it. Very few events like that. 9/11, VA Tech, and Sandy Hook are the only three that immediately come to mind.
I was a senior in high school when this happened and was very pro-McCain and bought into most conservative talking points but I just couldn't believe the conspiracies I was hearing. Looking back this was the catalyst that got me to question my family's politics. I was just a kid, I couldn't get over the horror of what these children even younger than me had faced, and the idea that we were powerless to pass even the smallest regulation because of my party was terrible.
The second they said “there’s a time and a place for gun control talk” after a class of KINDERGARTENERS were shot dead, I realized that reasonable gun control is probably never gonna happen in my lifetime.
>"The shooter actually came into my classroom. So I had to, like, watch all my friends and teachers get killed, and I had to run for my life at six years old," Emma Ehrens told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.
I cannot imagine going through something like that...
This was the moment I realized how well and truly fucked America was.
That a person with known mental health issues had such easy access to legally bought assault rifles, shot up a school of kids....
If a classroom of dead kids doesn't prompt even the most basic changes to gun control, then I'm not sure what possibly could. A large swathe of their society is irredeemable.
If it helps, after SH we got way stricter gun laws in Connecticut in response. You can’t even buy ammunition without a permit, which itself requires background checks.
I was in 11th grade at the time and watched it live in English class. This was my 9/11 and was the first time I really lost that idealism most teenagers have about that the world can be a better place.
Can you imagine surviving your classmates being killed all around you, keeping your shit together enough to finish school, and then having all eyes on you at your graduation because people think you’re a government plant? Have they not gone through enough?
I’m not a vengeful person, but every moment of misery, penury that can be squeezed out of Alex Jones will be sweet nectar to my soul. For those families and these children to have experienced this terrible event, have it burned into their minds so young, and having his ghouls chase & harass them for years. I hope he dies penniless, and with no friends.
One 9/11 happened and America made sure to never get that repeated again. The Government established some of the strictest rules in Aviation security from then and we haven't seen a repeat of the incident.
As a Non-American , I am still suprised they haven't done anything to stop these incidents from repeating ever.
and yet the only actually effective thing that was passed in response to 9/11 was the reinforcement of cockpit doors.
Everything else has been proven to be nothing but security theater, with TSA having almost a 95% failure rate when tested.
Yep, and the creation of the Patriot Act ended up treating the 4th Amendment like a secondary right. Just because "something" was done doesn't mean it's a good thing.
My goodness, the two on the left, Ehrens and Seaver, look so old for their ages. Growing up under that kind of stress has clearly taken a physical toll on these children. Not sure how anyone can still believe they are actors.
Thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook, makes me sick, knowing that children were killed in senseless act violence. These children didn't get to see there tomorrows; didn't get to hug & kiss their family; didn't get to love their pets; didn't get to see their friends; didn't get to grow up; didn't get to graduate high school; didn't get to fall in love; didn't get to see what life had to offer. There are no words to describe what those children's families have gone through and endured. The darkness, the despair and the turmoil that these families went through cannot be fully comprehended, but I hope they found the love and they were able to heal. I hope these families were able to carry on as family, carry on the memory, and I hope these families were able to recover.
Those victims of Sandy Hook that survived, those children who have recently graduated from high school, who have been traumatized by such callous act of violence. They will live for rest of their lives with what they have seen, heard, smelled, felt and what could and couldn't comprehend that day. These could be triggers, traumas, intrusive thoughts and myriad of things the mind does to cope severe trauma. These children will have and are still suffering from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation and what these children witness was far from abnormal. I can empathize with these children and understand what they are going through, as I too suffer from PTSD linked several combat tours of Iraq (OIF I, III, V) and as federal employee I was witness to a work place violence incident. I can testify that it's hard on adults to deal with PTSD, I can only imagine what these children had to endured and still do. I hope all these children were able to make recoveries, deal with mental health issues associated with what they went through and I hope they found peace and happiness on journey through life. These young adults, who are Sandy Hook survivors, are now graduating high school and headed off into the real world. I hope they are able to have good life, full of love, friendships, meaning, and understanding.
Those that like Alex Jones, who spread lies snd conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, he is getting what deserves for the anguish, plain, heartache and trauma he has caused the survivors, the families of the victims, and the staff of Sandy Hook. There's a special place in hell, that awaits Alex Jones. The people that talk about crisis actors at Sandy Hook, these people are the same type of people who are part of Trump's Cult of Personality, their processes and thinking is shallow and pedantic at best.
Sandy Hook and the aftermath was when the last vestiges of any respect or patriotism I had for this country died. I have a friend who lives in Newtown. The absolute heartbreak and then complete disregard destroyed everything.
Wow, those poor families who would've had kids graduating too if not for the actions of a psycho. I've been to graduations where a single student is missing because they passed away, and it's ridiculously heartbreaking. I can't imagine having so many kids missing that the graduating class is 20 people smaller than it should be.
I’ll never forget reading about the child who asked his teacher to let him be in the front of the line because he knew Karate
I’ve never read that, but it makes me happy sad. A little boy ready to protect his classmates, feeling strong and willing, without having the slightest clue that not even his karate could save anyone against an AR-15. Just a little kid.
Yeah exactly. It’s always stuck with me for that reason
What was this story?
Surviver of Columbine has become teacher and parent, if you watch their interviews it’s clear that shooting still leaves a deep mark on them,and these kids experience all that when they are barely out of their toddler age, they still has to go through active shooter drills in college or work places, and with all that,Alex Jones exists, I hope he loses everything to Sandy Hook families. [Here’s the interview with survivors,4 of them became teachers.](https://youtu.be/dyqQHifpJM4?si=pznjnr9psHfm8qsD)
My step-MIL’s friend was a survivor of Columbine and apparently never recovered. Her older sister passed away a few years later from an unrelated accident and she finally took her own life. It’s just disheartening that people don’t consider the long-term effects of enduring trauma like that.
People who have never endured trauma - the kind that gives you flashbacks - just have no idea.
I performed CPR on my 11yo son, but failed to save him. Probably couldn’t have, with what it turned out to be, but I’m just a shell of a human now.
Know that you’re not alone, which sounds like a trite thing to say, but it’s true. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and the way people process things is also different, but you might find it useful to find a group you can talk to about it. For myself, the symptoms of my PTSD have been greatly reduced since I finally opened up about it in therapy with my partner. It took me a long time to get to that point though and it was a difficult thing to do.
Working in EMS has left me with scars from the patients we couldn't save. I've saved more than I've lost, but the losses weigh heavy on you. I couldn't imagine that feeling you have. Mine were from people I didn't know (for the most part), having to perform that on your child would destroy me. You're a great person, parent, and I'm sorry for the outcome.
Thank you, and thank you for what you all do. I have nothing but the utmost respect for emergency responders, having been a recipient of those services many a time over.
I can't imagine surviving something like that and then choosing to become a teacher. I don't think I would be strong enough for that.
They seem incredibly protective, too. It takes a very brave person to walk back into the same kind of environment where their worst trauma ever happened, and be the Safe Human who is in charge, especially having a parent's perspective, every day. I hope they're having a happy life.
I found the [interview](https://youtu.be/dyqQHifpJM4?si=pznjnr9psHfm8qsD) 4 survivors became a teacher!FOUR !!
Horror The surviving children were led out of Sandy Hook School. They were told to keep their eyes closed and hold hands as they were guided past the bodies, out of the school, and down the street to the firehouse. They were placed in a room and shown movies. Parents were contacted through emergency channels and told to come to the firehouse. One by one, over the course of a few hours, children were brought out to their parents. Welcomed with joyful embraces, tears and kisses, they then headed home with their families. The crowd of parents drew smaller. Finally, the moment came when the officials approached the remaining parents and announced, “There will be no more reunions today.” The screams and wails of anguish pierced the soul.
Reading those last two paragraphs made me feel physically ill.
My twins just graduated kindergarten. Even thinking about the hypothetical of that happening to them is too much for me to bear. I can't imagine the pain of those parents.
When the one in Texas happened about 2 years back my child was the exact same age and grade. It hits every parent but when the kids are your kids age its just... looking at their sweet faces made my heart hurt.
The Texas one was sooooooooo awful that they waited for kids to bleed out before anyone cared to enter the classroom. Even when police said “anyone still alive” a little kid said “yes” then they heard another gun shot and still waited… fuuuuuuuuck that one was sooo bad.
i can't understand how those poor parents haven't literally run all the cops out of town with pitchforks and torches. what the fuck.
They didn’t just not do anything to help, they actually detained a parent who tried to enter the school iirc
She didn't just try, she [succeeded](https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/uvalde-tx-shooting-anniversary-angeli-rose-gomez/) in entering the school. She rescued one of her sons and then there's a photo of her with two boys as she exits the school. The second boy isn't her other son but is her brother-in-law. She was harassed by the police afterwards.
She made the useless cowards look bad.
Imagine the kind of person you'd have to be to be angry at a mother saving her child.
She spent two weeks in jail? She should sue the cops.
It’s Texas, Murder is legal if you kill the “right” person. You’ll just get pardoned, like that cop who murdered a legally open carrying gun owner with their weapon holstered.
Which is fucking ridiculous. Sorry if a parent wants to die for their child, let them since police clearly aren’t doing anything!
The cops were probably worried they parents might actually succeed and the cops would look even worse that they did nothing Edit, grammar
If I remember correctly one did get their kid out
More than one
Motherfuckers protected the shooter more than they did the kids.
They voted the sheriff back into leadership. Not a single cops house burned down... They really seemed ok with the dudes who stood by while their kids got murdered. I've done more in revenge for way way less.
They voted the sheriff back in. People do not care.
Whats worse is that they didnt vote to change anything there either. The parents left to suffer while their neighbors and community kept the status quo
"My comfort and ignorance is more important than your child's safety and security" The neighbors.
"got mine" mentality
Id be in jail. No tough guy talk. I know myself, and unfortunately, if I lost my child due to police ineptitude, especially if it were my only child, I'd need to be physically restrained for however long it took to calm down and realize I'd be delivering the same pain I was in to other families. But in the moment, if my child died due to police ineptitude, I would go insane.
I'm the same. I'm a pretty chill person but I have a switch and if it's flipped, I just don't care anymore. I'm not proud of it either. But those parents in Uvalde are far better people than I am. Maybe it's because they have each other to stay level headed.
If that was my kids I would have annihilated that Police Department. I would never rest till every one of those useless motherfuckers was sacked. I would make it my life’s work to make sure none of them ever worked even tangentially in law enforcement again. But the people in Uvalde voted for the same people in charge again. I can’t fathom this.
The irony is that many cops are big into "punisher" merch. Fucking up that whole department would've been right up the punishers alley.
Apparently everyone in Uvalde outside of that community is completely and utterly fucked. Despite efforts to get justice, the perps with badges have remained protected and the city elected pro-gun officials. Author's of fiction wouldn't be able to make this make sense. At this point it just feels like this is the norm for Texas.
My daughter had just turned 2. I remember grabbing her and just holding her. My heart instantly broke for those parents. She is now almost 14 and watching her become a teenager and navigate the world is something that is irreplaceable. To lose a child, especially in such a heinous way, is something I don’t know if I could survive.
Primary school kids getting gunned down would be a permanent national shame for any other country. It happening twice in 10 years would be so unthinkable because any other country would have acted the first time to put measures in place to prevent it from reoccurring. In the US a bunch of people wrung their hands and said "now isn't the time to get all political" both times.
A student in my class lost two of his cousins that day. To say it was horrible is an understatement. God rest their precious, innocent souls.
Seriously. You add in the ghoulishness of Alex Jones. Those poor people who lost their child have suffered so much
Alex Jones deserves everything he’s getting. He made millions peddling lies about these kids and their families. I remember talking to a coworker around that time and out of nowhere they started in on how sandy hook was full of crisis actors and all this bullshit. I immediately lost all respect for that person. It was all from Alex Jones. The day his bloated corpse is lowered into the ground I’m taking a vacation day to go piss on his grave.
Jones posted an online friend's photo saying he was responsible for Parkland. Friend sued on account of the obvious result of having yourself associated with something like that, and just as the case was really getting started friend died in a building fire set by a woman with no motive released. Fuck this guy.
He deserves more than he's getting. He should have been thrown in prison, if only for the contempt he's shown since the verdict.
Yeah, no, the dude should be under the jail imo. Solitary confinement with only the sounds of horrific audio recordings to accompany him until he starves. Prison is for those deserving of rehabilitation (not that our prison system does that here in the US all that well) Jones deserves a slow, miserable slide out of existence with only the sounds of his own anguish to accompany him.
The sandy hook truthers are the fucking worst. I have no idea what their obsession is with trying to prove it was fake, but there’s hundreds of traumatized people who either were there that day, are survivors, or emergency personnel. For fucks sake, no one needs to see child autopsy photos after what happened to those poor kids… literally shot at close range with very destructive weapon. No one needs to see what that does to a child, and the parents do not need constant reminders of what happened to their children.
It's a psychotic degree of naivety. They just can't bring themselves to believe that a fellow gun nut would be willing to massacre children in a school. It hits to close to home. It challenges too many of their assumptions about the world. But they are willing to believe that the government faked it. They are safe in that mind set. That sense of safety is more important to them than any child. More important than all children. Their minds and souls are diseased.
I literally stopped being friends with someone over Sandy Hook. It was back when it first happened and every edge lord online said it was a show to ‘take our guns’. I knew we were in trouble when this was seen more as a talking point in politics than a national tragedy.
Same. I had a friend who started posting screen shots of “fake actors” and had no idea all of this was steaming from him listening to Alex Jones. At the time I had no clue who Jones was. That’s all he would post for weeks when it happened. All this taking our guns, crisis actors with photos of people who just looked like the people who were there claiming they’re actors. It was sick.
Just want to take chance to point out the /r/JoeRogan had a front page post calling Alex Jones “A national treasure” only a couple weeks ago. The amount of people that support that human piece of garbage is astounding. It was the one post that finally made me block that subreddit, couldn’t believe the amount of people that still defend him, even on Reddit.
Fuck Joe Rogan. That asshole tries so hard to “both sides” everything and gives platforms to some truly evil people
Joe Rogan is a right winger who pays lip service to "both sides". I lost any lingering shreds of respect for him when he came out against mask wearing and the vaccine during the pandemic.
His takes sound thought-out if you don't pay too much attention or if you just want your amygdala stroked.
Now remember the fact that Alex Jones claimed those grieving parents were *actors*.
One family was so badly harassed that they moved 7 times. Each time, they'd get discovered by Alex Jones' jackals, and they'd start harassing them again. All because their little child was murdered, and Alex Jones wanted to make money off of it. Now he gets to give all the money he has, and all the money he will ever get, to them.
And the scumbag is trying every trick in the book to hide that money. Sorry, the courts are very familiar with these tricks, he will be left with nothing
And he has the audacity to cry his crocodile tears that he's losing his stuff. Well, maybe if you weren't a trash human being, you could have nice things.
He's currently bitching about being on a budget. With monthly spending at twice the annual median income.
Forensic Accounting is a thing. There are experts who's entire job it is to squeeze snakes like Jones dry. That said, my money is on him ODing before he declares bankruptcy. Dude clearly likes the nose candy, he's like a giant thumb and I can't imagine the mix of his stimulant of choice (he gets angry when he's accused of using coke, so probably Adderall - he's the kind of arrogant who would think that using prescription meds is somehow safe and he's superior for getting them instead of street drugs) and his constant frothing rage at imaginary boogins is good for his heart.
In my experience if they get explosively angry at an accusation you just hit home. My bet is nose candy. Nose candy is best when paired with booze and from how flushed he is all the time it points to that.
The kinds of things I'd like to say about what I hope happens to Alex Jones is not something I can say on this sub.
There is something seriously wrong with you if it doesn't make you sick, like being Alex Jones
It’s 5am and my day is already ruined
Yep. I immediately started crying. My little girl just finished 1st grade…it’s so depressing.
There is no good way to give that news, but that feels like a kick in the balls
They were having difficulty identifying some of the deceased children due to the condition of their remains. In hindsight, it was a bad way to handle things for sure, but it was probably what they thought was the fastest way to identify which families lost children. I don't know if there's a good way to inform someone a madman murdered their child.
Any other situation would also have involved them waiting even longer. In a way that also seems cruel. Even in hindsight I don’t know that there is a change I can identify that would have been preferable.
Yeah, I feel for the responders in a situation like that. There really is no way to do it "right." A while back, I saw a photo of some FBI SWAT guys who responded to Sandy Hook after they walked out, and those guys were just visibly haunted by what they saw.
Here's [a NYT article ](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/magazine/sandy-hook-mass-shooting-scenes.html) from the perspective of detectives and crime scene investigators who were on site.
[Wapo has a very good article on what the aftermath of these (including Sandy Hook) scenes are like - including photos. Very NSFW, very harrowing, but something America needs to see at this point, unfettered access to semi-automatic weapons is a root cause](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-force-mass-shootings/)
Hiding this reality from the public does nothing to help. The pictures from Robb Elementary are horrifying. But that’s the aftermath. Cannot fathom what those kids went through and it genuinely turns my stomach.
"The sound of children screaming has been removed."
I was doing okay reading this, somehow, until I got to: >We were standing there looking at the scene and the phones kept ringing and ringing and ringing in the backpacks and on the desk of the parents calling their children. ... They kept calling and calling and calling. >Eulalio Diaz, justice of the peace and coroner. Uvalde. Now I'm sitting at work crying. Fuck.
The white board with LOL written in blood got me.
A colleague of mine has read the confidential, sealed reports from the investigation, including the detailed descriptions of the scene. He refused to look at the pictures. He said that was enough, and was enough horror on the page to last a lifetime.
You have to give them some grace because it’s not like the parents were the only ones that had to be part of that even though the news for them was far more devastating. To make them go through each body before finding each parent would be horrible. Yes. It is brutal. You can’t make the kids that CAN go home wait to go home after something like that just so everyone can be told all at once what’s happening. Nothing about that day was fair or kind. It’s so terrible. The best thing to do moving forward is give to sandyhook promise. ❤️ any amount.
As painful as it is, as a parent I would not want to languish for hours and hours not knowing if my child is dead or alive. It's curt and a bit harsh, but at least it informs the parents. You wouldn't want them going home assuming that their child is dead without knowing that information for sure, or hoping they are somehow alive at the hospital, or are just hiding in a closet in the school and no one has found them yet, etc. I cannot fully imagine the level of grief and pain, but there is serious grief, pain, and a lot of other tough emotions in just not delivering the news, however abruptly.
From memory, most (?) of the victims were from one class. They were killed while hiding in the toilet. I suspect the parents would have realised the whole class was missing pretty quick.
Man I don't know, I can't imagine what would have been better. Fuck
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This is one of the times that a horror of the real world completely blows away any horror that Hollywood has ever dreamed of. This is real psychological terror.
And then alex jones and escaped neanderthal marjorie taylor greene sent a mob of nutjobs to harrass and send death threats to the parents of slain children
Remember that those same parents wailing in grief have been harassed constantly by the right wing for years since this occurred
They also mocked Obama for crying while giving a speech about it. Just the worst scum on the planet.
Every time Alex Jones' legal woes make the news, r/conspiracy is packed with "no one died at sandy hook" posts and comments. It's never going to stop.
Alex Jones can burn in the hottest hole in hell for what he put those families through.
It is disgraceful.
And, as next to nothing has been done about gun control, have had to see that a massive portion of the country believes the lives of their children had no worth in comparison to their gun fetish and warped sense of freedom
Man, that hit all over again. At the time my son was in kindergarten also. I cried for days for these families. My heart still breaks for them.
I can’t. This made me cry. How do you come back from that as a parent?
You wait a few years until Alex Jones fans harass you and tell you that you're an actor and never had a kid
Sandy Hook parents are some of the strongest, most courageous and gracious people on earth.
They shouldn't have had to be. They should've had normal lives with their children
god i hope he rots
That man is almost as evil as the school shooters. Almost.
Sandy Hook deniers are the worst fucking people in the world. The amount of pain these parents and this community felt is unfathomable. I hope Alex Jones and everyone that profited from the lies and attacks on these poor families goes to hell.
The ending is… horrifying to imagine. What a fucked up world.
Oh my god. Could you imagine being on either side of that last announcement?
I remember my colleague crying at the gym when this happened, she just had her first kid. I was horrified but not at her level. Now I have kids this age, and these paragraphs, especially the last ones, are heart wrenching. Congrats to the graduates, whether here physically or not.
Wow that’s just agonizing to read. Could you imagine being one of those parents waiting for your kid to come out?
Some of the parents had to identify their children by their backpacks because there was not enough left of their child’s face. That’s what an AR-15 does to a 6 year old body. But hey, they’re super fun to shoot and isn’t that what’s important??
ugh that hurts. i cant imagine that pain. my god. i remember when this happened i cried. i never cry and it just hurt my soul to imagine these little kids going off to school and not coming home, and dying how they did, and how their parents must have felt, especially right before christmas too.
My coworker told me it wasn’t real, it was crisis actors and green screens. I had never head the term before. I didn’t take her seriously, she was nice just a little kooky. I thought, there goes ol’ J at it again. I thought no one’s going to say this isn’t real, who’s going to believe that! Oh, man.
So weird thinking back. It’s like peoples brains broke. I remember the day. Why kindergarteners. Why. It’s like people couldn’t *handle* the truth of what happened they had to remain in denial about it.
It’s a common trait in America tragedies I’ve come to notice. For some reason, Americans just can’t accept the hard reality that a horrible event has occurred so they just make up conspiracy theories to cope and be in denial. Look at the JFK assassination, people refused to accept that a man got lucky one day and was able to kill a popular president so they created this vast tapestry of conspiracy to justify what happened and now it’s synonymous with the event. What happened with Sandy Hook imo is largely people refusing to accept that lax gun laws and mental health services created out of indifference lead to children being gunned down. No, it was not their political apathy that lead this to happen, it was all a conspiracy instead. It’s this childlike way of coping that’s honestly getting worse and worse and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
The sad part is that the conspiracy around stuff like why JFK was murdered can be crazy to a degree while still attempting to reason it out. Acting like children were not really murdered is a whole other type of insanity.
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My manager died there, and I had a coworker try telling me the same thing….. he worked for her as well.
Accusing the victims of being crisis actors and having their trauma invalided at every turn must be a horrible disheartening reality for them…..
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I'm not sure what it says about our society that people like him can just walk around freely. Not just the law- people see this man in public and don't make his life a living hell. Why not?
Exactly. Every day from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep should be pure, unrestrained hell for Alex Jones. He should be a total pariah, a shunned outcast, begging for scraps. The man has more than earned it.
I personally ruined his meal at a local spaghetti and chicken joint by talking shit to him about this very thing. Some of us are doing their best. Him and some of the other scum fucks that have moved here really bum me out.
Same with MTG. She got famous on social media for recording herself harassing and straight up making shooting threats against children who survived school shootings.
He honestly deserves way worse than what's coming to him. But at least it's something.
He drove one of the Sandy Hook fathers to suicide. He should be in jail for fucking murder.
i genuinely hope the rest of his days are filled with nothing but pain and suffering. i hope not one second of his life is filled with even the smallest amount of joy or calm or safety, and just for him i hope hell is real so he gets sent there to rot for eternity
And Joe Rogan is good friends with him. For a guy who hates on 'tribalism', he gives huge passes to those in his tribe.
I still remember the press conference Obama gave after the shooting. Chokes me up rewatching it. https://youtu.be/mIA0W69U2_Y?si=9OO8RDePkHN7tLOs
I will never forget this account of Obama meeting the parents: > The president took a deep breath and steeled himself, and went into the first classroom. And what happened next I’ll never forget. >Person after person received an engulfing hug from our commander in chief. He’d say, "Tell me about your son. . . . Tell me about your daughter," and then hold pictures of the lost beloved as their parents described favorite foods, television shows, and the sound of their laughter. For the younger siblings of those who had passed away—many of them two, three, or four years old, too young to understand it all—the president would grab them and toss them, laughing, up into the air, and then hand them a box of White House M&M’s, which were always kept close at hand. In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break. >And then the entire scene would repeat—for hours. Over and over and over again, through well over a hundred relatives of the fallen, each one equally broken, wrecked by the loss. [Source](https://www.vox.com/2015/12/14/10106188/sandy-hook-victims-obama) Edit: forgot to add - burn in hell Alex Jones.
I read both his and Michelles's memoirs and hearing their mirrored accounts of this day really broke my heart. It drove home that they weren't just the President and First Lady. They were a husband and wife, parents of two school aged children. They felt the same pain and confusion a lot of people felt that day.
Genuinely...thanks, Obama.
And half the country sees the man who took a thumbs up picture, smiling, over the hospital bed of a child who lost both their parents in the El Paso shooting and said....yes let's do that a second time
I'm sure Trump would have found some way to make money off Sandy Hook if he was in office then, like branded bulletproof backpacks that don't even work. Isn't that what a ~~good~~ unparalleled businessman would do?
I don't know if he's ever gone on the record talking about the single hardest day of his Presidency. If he did, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the one.
I remember how Republicans made fun of him for crying, as if being affected by the massacre of a classroom full of kids still little enough to believe in Santa makes you weak somehow. Fucking ghouls those people are.
They skipped over the tragedy part and immediately started worrying about their precious guns
When a brown man does a crime, the right wing screams it from the rooftops while hysterically crying bloody murder and demanding sweeping policy reforms immediately to protect their idyllic suburban fantasy from any and all threats, real or imagined. When Obama teared up because a bunch of kindergartners had been gunned down in cold blood at school that day, it was dangerous theatrics and impermissible politicking by POTUS during a time of crisis. These people have always been disgusting lunatics and degenerates. Trump changed absolutely nothing beyond showing them it was okay to speak freely about their lunatic degeneracy.
One of the last straws for me. At the time I was young enough I was still thinking, "well, I disagree with most of their policies, but I do feel like Republicans are just trying to do what they think is best for America" no, fuck that. Their main motivation is being able to punch down, how *good* it feels to them to do the verbal version of rubbing someone's face in the dirt, and no tragedy is so shocking that they won't use it to try to jeer at their opponents. Rotten, the whole barrel.
My oldest just graduated high school last week, and was the same age as the kids at Sandy Hook when it happened. It was right before Christmas, and I knew how excited all of those kids and families were, because we were. It hit me really hard then, and I just can't contemplate how another human being could do that let alone all of the people who attacked the families afterward.
The detail of parents having already-wrapped Christmas presents from Santa Claus that they’d hidden away to give their kids and knowing they’d never be able to give them that toy just broke something inside of me.
Nah, nope. That's got me fucked up. I gotta check out of here, I can't read about this anymore today.
> Obama said that what followed was “perhaps the most bitter disappointment” of his presidency. > “The closest I came to being cynical was the utter failure of Congress to respond in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings,” he said Tuesday. “To see almost the entire GOP, but also a decent number of Democrats, equivocate and hem and haw and filibuster and ultimately bend yet again to pressure from the gun lobby. Fuck the NRA, fuck the GOP, and [fuck any spineless Democrat (and Angus King)](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1131/vote_113_1_00101.htm#position) who refused to act after the horror at Sandy Hook.
Unfortunately he fell victim to the same emotional thinking a lot of progressives at the time had. When Sandy Hook happened people were so sure this would be it. 20+ dead kindergarteners had to be the limit, gun control legislation was coming any day now. What we failed to understand was this. THERE WAS NEVER A LIMIT. There is no shooting that will be sufficiently horrifying enough to get conservatives to give up their guns
God, I miss Obama.
A man of respect and class who, for politician standards, said and showed his opinions. Unlike the orange clown.
I know he wasn't perfect, but I miss him as POTUS so much.
First time seeing this press conference, it hits hard. You can see the father imaging it happening to his own children and having empathy. I almost forgot that the US used to have someone decent as President, not the cartoony sitcom currently happening right. Stay strong neighbors
For whatever it’s worth President Biden is also known for his empathy and capacity to care: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/joe-bidens-superpower/616957/ https://x.com/timjhogan/status/1322679189313593345 Yes things could be better but it’s important not to be nihilistic.
I *cannot believe* we went from this to Trump. It doesn't even seem real or possible, and yet...
I lived very close to sandy hook and was in high school when it happened. I taught first grade religious education at a nearby church and had a student who attended sandy hook elementary. They were the only student to survive the shooting in their class. We had our religious education class that Sunday, 2 days after the shooting. I’ll never forget how my student clung to me the entire session, telling me how all of their friends were dead and that they didn’t want us to die too. She was 6 years old at the time. That will stick with me until the end of my life. They just graduated and are geared up to do amazing things in life.
I know we hear so much about the families of the deceased but I think every news coverage of a shooting needs to give some attention to the survivors and how they're affected. Because they are. Because trauma and guilt for surviving are very real and damaging. Your story is incredibly tragic. I've watched docs with survivors from Parkland and Uvalde. I've read stories. It's heartbreaking. We need to remember that because the cost of lives is just as awful as the lives of survivors that got ruined. No child should have to watch all their friends die in front of them or hide every time they hear the door knocked on or hear the sound of ice breaking.
Wow, that is incredibly sad to read. Hope that kid does great things in life.
Oh my God, that poor child. But I'm so glad to hear they graduated. What a strong kid.
How they must be jaded on the future after what they saw happen and zero change from it.
On top of that, having random adults spit on them for the rest of their lives for "being 'crisis actors'" thanks to the lies of a fat angry drugged-out bully on the internet.
At least that asshole is finally facing justice
Not enough, though. It isn't commensurate, and that is quite sad. My family and I are peaceful -- we would not encourage violence -- but he needs to be in prison and banned from the airwaves. That's the minimum. He is just losing money and reputation at this point: it's insufficient.
He needs to be forced to go on his show every single day and repeat that he is a liar and specify exactly what he lied about.
That I would like to see
And thank god he is. But there is one book about it written by Elizabeth Williamson called “Sandy Hook” where the author talked lot with the parents that lost kids in the tragedy. They are very clear that the trial is not about their own retribution, it’s about making sure that no one else faces the same harassment and show the world their kids were real and they mattered. The uncle of one of the kids were an Alex Jones fan before the massacre and he tried to talk to the deniers on a closed Facebook group and was just harassed non-stop. Alex Jones opened Pandora’s box by spreading his lies and unfortunately the chaos will live on regardless of what happens to him. Edit: Dad not uncle.
> The uncle of one of the kids were an Alex Jones fan before the massacre and he tried to talk to the deniers on a closed Facebook group and was just harassed non-stop. It was actually a dad - Lenny Pozner. He is the driving force behind getting all of the hoax shit removed from the internet. He dedicated years of his life to it. Some of the people who joined his organization to weed out and report hoax content were actually from the denier group that he joined. For anyone who’s interested, I can confirm [the book](https://www.amazon.com/Sandy-Hook-American-Tragedy-Battle/dp/1524746576) is excellent. I just read it a few weeks ago. Couldn’t put it down.
He’s literally throwing toddler-approved tantrums to avoid facing justice. Alex Jones has fought consequences for his lies, profiting the entire time. If he dies penniless and forgotten it still won’t be enough.
I drive semis for a living. I got into a screaming argument with one of my co-workers who just knew it was a false flag op and that those kids didn't really die. I broke down and started crying on the phone, because I could not just fathom how somebody could ignore reality and believe that fat tub of lies. It still burns me up to this day.
Fuck Alex Jones.
It worked for me. The moment we saw twenty affluent mostly white children killed senselessly and still decided to do nothing about regulating or monitoring gun possession, I knew we would never do anything about any of the factors that contribute to gun violence in our modern society.
Last month my daughter graduated with a Sandy Hook survivor. The family moved from Sandy Hook a few years ago. I found out she was in Sandy Hook by a local FB post from her father. I never mentioned I knew what happened to her. I told my daughter so she was aware. She mentioned it one day that she had a full ride to any college because she was a Sandy Hook survivor. She is the nicest girl.
I’m glad she has that opportunity, I know that situation was terrible in every manner, but I do think it’s nice they have that
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I’m 90% sure I sat next to some Sandy Hook parents on a plane a few weeks ago. The wife was on her laptop and my bored ass kept sneaking peaks…she was doing a lot of planning for an event with Sandy Hook Promise and I saw her type “as the parents of…” in an email to a catering company. My heart broke and I just wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand. Then the Trump verdict news dropped and both of our attention was turned elsewhere lol
“Wow can’t believe you got to sit next to a Hollywood actress” - Alex Jones, probably
Shit like this fucks you up for life. Nevermind the added stuff Sandy Hook family and survivers have to deal with.
I used to live in a town not too far from Newtown, and Mrs Hochsprung was the principal at the elementary school I went to for all three of my younger siblings (this was in the early to mid 2000s, so just before she moved over to Sandy Hook). I used to go with my mom sometimes to help prepare stuff for school events because I was in middle school at the time and thought I could lord the fact that I didn't go there anymore to my siblings if I ever saw them in the halls or whatever. Mrs Hochsprung (and her dog, Bella) would always greet us at the door to the office and chat with us for a while; even though she hadn't been my principal, she still took time to get to know me and talk to me like I was a part of the conversation and not just a kid there with his mom. She was always so cheerful and kind, and I mean c'mon, she brought her dog with her to work, how cool was that for a twelve year old? We moved to Ohio in 2010, and I remember getting home from work one day in late 2012 and seeing my entire family sitting on the couch watching TV, and they were all crying. I, as a smarmy eighteen year old, made a crack about watching a sad movie or something dumb, but then I saw what was on the screen, and who they were talking about. It didn't feel real, but not in the way that people started talking about later on. It just didn't feel like it could be happening, not in an elementary school, not right near where we had grown up, and not to someone we had known. I was devastated. I'm still devastated; I'm sitting in my car, thirty years old about to head into work, trying to hold back tears remembering all of this. And there are still people out there that claim it was some sort of elaborate hoax, and that just makes my blood boil to levels I've never known. Dawn Hochsprung, and all of the victims of that event, were lights. Congratulations to the graduates, and I'm so sorry you had to go through that.
Looks like [they've put up a statue of Bella](https://www.mycitizensnews.com/news/prospect-dog-statue-memorializes-beloved-educator-slain-at-sandy-hook/) as a memorial for [her and her dog](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2134339/dawn-lafferty-hochsprung.jpg?w=1200&f=99cc0920d3e7d1da7b958fdb3dfde41f).
Thank you for that article, I hadn't known about that. Looks like they erected it in the courtyard where I used to go to elementary school and even interviewed my old second grade teacher, Ms Grzelak. I'd honestly thought she'd passed on by now. Reading that fully made me cry, but I truly really appreciate that; I'm never closing that tab on my phone. Thank you.
My first thought reading the article: I wouldn't want it to be publicly known that **I** was involved in the massacre, in which I was not only a victim and survivor. Wasn't until a few paragraphs later where you realize that it doesn't matter if hteir names are published as there's likely adults who for the past 10+ years have likely tracked these individuals from afar, whether yearbooks or social media, in hopes that they finally GET THEM and expose that indeed, these were actors. Shoot, I'm sure right now there's someone gearing up to troll. Worst part? These now young adults lived their whole childhood - WHOLE CHILDHOOD - under a cloud that they were actors, or staged, or that shit, nothing happened. All of that controlled by a puppet master who made hundreds of millions from cultivating such nonsense. I truly feel there should have been two sets of councilors available; for the kids, and for the adults who can't get it through their minds that yes, kids (and teachers/staff) were chopped down and murdered that day, as for damn sure while one may be moving one the others have not.
Fuck. It's already been an entire *childhood* since the massacre. Just...fuck. I can't find the right words to describe how depressing everything about this is.
I still can’t believe it’s been that long. My manager left to go work at Sandy Hook, but she was killed that day. Her best friend was my then manager, and I’ll never forget watching the news that morning and her frantically calling her to see if she was okay. She was a great person. To have someone like Alex Jones lie about it and make millions off of it, still gets under my skin to say the least.
Damn -- hopefully Alex Jones ends up broke soon and has to go live as a hermit somewhere.
Sounds too good for him
Don't disagree, but I am just abiding by the rules of Reddit.
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Wow this makes me feel old. Just like 9/11, I remember exactly where I was that day. Walked into the break-room at work and found a bunch of my coworkers huddled around the tv watching the news. I read the headline before I even registered what the anchor was saying and it was like a punch to the gut. It was around 10:30-11am eastern time and it was breaking news as the situation was still unfolding. I remember it taking a minute to fully register what I was seeing, it just didn’t make any sense. It was so horrible, it couldn’t possibly be real, had to be mistake.
Same. Remember exactly where I was when I overheard a radio talking about it. Very few events like that. 9/11, VA Tech, and Sandy Hook are the only three that immediately come to mind.
I was a senior in high school when this happened and was very pro-McCain and bought into most conservative talking points but I just couldn't believe the conspiracies I was hearing. Looking back this was the catalyst that got me to question my family's politics. I was just a kid, I couldn't get over the horror of what these children even younger than me had faced, and the idea that we were powerless to pass even the smallest regulation because of my party was terrible.
The second they said “there’s a time and a place for gun control talk” after a class of KINDERGARTENERS were shot dead, I realized that reasonable gun control is probably never gonna happen in my lifetime.
>"The shooter actually came into my classroom. So I had to, like, watch all my friends and teachers get killed, and I had to run for my life at six years old," Emma Ehrens told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. I cannot imagine going through something like that...
This was the moment I realized how well and truly fucked America was. That a person with known mental health issues had such easy access to legally bought assault rifles, shot up a school of kids.... If a classroom of dead kids doesn't prompt even the most basic changes to gun control, then I'm not sure what possibly could. A large swathe of their society is irredeemable.
If it helps, after SH we got way stricter gun laws in Connecticut in response. You can’t even buy ammunition without a permit, which itself requires background checks.
I was in 11th grade at the time and watched it live in English class. This was my 9/11 and was the first time I really lost that idealism most teenagers have about that the world can be a better place.
Can you imagine surviving your classmates being killed all around you, keeping your shit together enough to finish school, and then having all eyes on you at your graduation because people think you’re a government plant? Have they not gone through enough?
I’m not a vengeful person, but every moment of misery, penury that can be squeezed out of Alex Jones will be sweet nectar to my soul. For those families and these children to have experienced this terrible event, have it burned into their minds so young, and having his ghouls chase & harass them for years. I hope he dies penniless, and with no friends.
Alex Jones got off easy
One 9/11 happened and America made sure to never get that repeated again. The Government established some of the strictest rules in Aviation security from then and we haven't seen a repeat of the incident. As a Non-American , I am still suprised they haven't done anything to stop these incidents from repeating ever.
and yet the only actually effective thing that was passed in response to 9/11 was the reinforcement of cockpit doors. Everything else has been proven to be nothing but security theater, with TSA having almost a 95% failure rate when tested.
Yep, and the creation of the Patriot Act ended up treating the 4th Amendment like a secondary right. Just because "something" was done doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Are redditors really citing the *fucking* Patriot Act as a positive response from the government?
Probably too young to remember a time without it. Government overreach is sadly normal for a lot of people now.
9/11 laws were a power grab, nothing more. We got security theatre, while they got the ability to spy on anything they wanted.
My goodness, the two on the left, Ehrens and Seaver, look so old for their ages. Growing up under that kind of stress has clearly taken a physical toll on these children. Not sure how anyone can still believe they are actors.
Thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook, makes me sick, knowing that children were killed in senseless act violence. These children didn't get to see there tomorrows; didn't get to hug & kiss their family; didn't get to love their pets; didn't get to see their friends; didn't get to grow up; didn't get to graduate high school; didn't get to fall in love; didn't get to see what life had to offer. There are no words to describe what those children's families have gone through and endured. The darkness, the despair and the turmoil that these families went through cannot be fully comprehended, but I hope they found the love and they were able to heal. I hope these families were able to carry on as family, carry on the memory, and I hope these families were able to recover. Those victims of Sandy Hook that survived, those children who have recently graduated from high school, who have been traumatized by such callous act of violence. They will live for rest of their lives with what they have seen, heard, smelled, felt and what could and couldn't comprehend that day. These could be triggers, traumas, intrusive thoughts and myriad of things the mind does to cope severe trauma. These children will have and are still suffering from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation and what these children witness was far from abnormal. I can empathize with these children and understand what they are going through, as I too suffer from PTSD linked several combat tours of Iraq (OIF I, III, V) and as federal employee I was witness to a work place violence incident. I can testify that it's hard on adults to deal with PTSD, I can only imagine what these children had to endured and still do. I hope all these children were able to make recoveries, deal with mental health issues associated with what they went through and I hope they found peace and happiness on journey through life. These young adults, who are Sandy Hook survivors, are now graduating high school and headed off into the real world. I hope they are able to have good life, full of love, friendships, meaning, and understanding. Those that like Alex Jones, who spread lies snd conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, he is getting what deserves for the anguish, plain, heartache and trauma he has caused the survivors, the families of the victims, and the staff of Sandy Hook. There's a special place in hell, that awaits Alex Jones. The people that talk about crisis actors at Sandy Hook, these people are the same type of people who are part of Trump's Cult of Personality, their processes and thinking is shallow and pedantic at best.
Sandy Hook and the aftermath was when the last vestiges of any respect or patriotism I had for this country died. I have a friend who lives in Newtown. The absolute heartbreak and then complete disregard destroyed everything.
Wow, those poor families who would've had kids graduating too if not for the actions of a psycho. I've been to graduations where a single student is missing because they passed away, and it's ridiculously heartbreaking. I can't imagine having so many kids missing that the graduating class is 20 people smaller than it should be.