On the Third Anniversary of Sandy Hook, One Blunt Tweet Still Says It All
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December 14 marks the three-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and one viral summer tweet from Telegraph commentator Dan Hodges sums up what has happened since that horrible day in 2012:
In theory, the Sandy Hook massacre should have been a wake-up call to strengthen gun control in the U.S. because 20 children were killed. But as many on social media have noted, hundreds of school shootings have occurred since Sandy Hook and many have failed to pass gun safety measures despite the senseless tragedy in recent American history. Many U.S. gun control activists are calling on expanded background checks for people who buy guns and a ban on sales to anyone on a federal watch list on Monday, Reuters reports.
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You can see some of the other responses that people are having:
Why America's gun laws haven't changed
Check out this ATTN: video.
An American kid has died every other day by a gun since Sandy Hook.
An NBC News analysis found that 554 kids under the age of 12 have died of gun violence since the Sandy Hook tragedy three years ago. NBC News looked at news reports and other information available to the public to determine this figure, noting that the number of deaths is likely higher than 554 because suicides and certain gun deaths sometimes go unreported.
"Even so, it works out to a rate of just under one death of a child by firearm every two days in this country," NBC News' Polly DeFrank and Mike Brunker wrote. "That's not an improvement from the rate before Sandy Hook, and one new government dataset suggests that the risk of children dying by gunfire may even have increased slightly since then."
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Sadly, the Sandy Hook tragedy wasn't even the only shooting in the country that day three years ago. Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, told NBC News that highly publicized tragedies such as the San Bernardino massacre are only part of the larger gun problem in the U.S.
"Mass shootings get all the attention, but they are a small part of the overall problem," he said. "On the same day as the Sandy Hook shooting, about 90 other people died as the result of a shooting."
In the wake of Sandy Hook, Congress has rejected multiple pieces of legislation intended to tighten federal gun laws, including a bipartisan bill supported by Sens. Joe Manchin, (D-West Virginia), and Pat Toomey, (R-Pennsylvania) that called for the expansion of background checks on gun purchases. A 2014 update to a report that was initially published shortly after Sandy Hook found that 15 states had strengthened gun laws in the immediate aftermath of the Connecticut shooting. Those jurisdictions, however, cover less than half the U.S. population.
Up until the San Bernardino tragedy a few weeks ago, Sandy Hook marked the worst mass shooting in America. Less than a week before San Bernardino, there was another mass shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood location. In October, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer killed nine in a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Six months ago, Dylann Storm Roof opened fire in the historically Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine.
