"Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven"
-Matthew 19:14
-Matthew 19:14
And, tragically, it culminated on May 24, 2022, when the United States suffered its deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade. At Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a disturbed 18-year-old gunman named Salvador Ramos entered, armed with a .223-caliber DDM4 V7 rifle, and massacred 19 fourth-grade children and two teachers before being killed in a shootout with responding police officers.
The horrific massacre at Robb Elementary School was eerily similar to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, almost ten years ago. Both shooters had a history of disturbing, isolative behavior. Both targeted family members before attacking their school. And both were able to obtain a deadly, high-powered rifle and use it to slaughter innocent children en-masse.
And, like what followed the shooting at Sandy Hook, we are seeing the same calls from the American public for gun control measures, and the same deafening silence from lawmakers who have for decades refused to pass any legislation to regulate the sale and production of these firearms.
They have instead resorted to blaming "mental health", "violent video games", and - most disgustingly - even the "slow response" of the police officers who risked their lives to take down the shooter at Uvalde even as he relentlessly fired at them from inside the classroom he barricaded himself.
So, what has changed? What, if anything, have we done? And what can be done in the future?
I think it is best to start from the beginning. As we all begin to process this latest act of violence, let's look back at the massacre at Sandy Hook - a tragedy that was, more than anything, a watershed moment in the long, bloodied history of American gun culture.
The Mad Monster
To discuss the massacre at Sandy Hook would be impossible without discussing the disturbed, twisted young man who wrought untold destruction upon a quiet, suburban community. His story is integral to understanding why and how the tragedy unfolded.
Adam Peter Lanza was born on April 22, 1992, to Nancy and Peter Lanza in the town of Exeter, New Hampshire, and moved to the town of Newtown, Connecticut, at the age of 6.
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| Adam Lanza as a youth. Though he was highly intelligent, Lanza was extremely disturbed and antisocial, rarely interacting with others and easily prone to nervous breakdowns. |
From the age of 3, it became clear that Adam was an unusual child. While most children tend to frolic and play with others, Adam shied away from people and preferred to keep to himself. He was extremely sensitive to noise and human touch, and would become extremely distressed when around others.
In elementary school, Lanza's bizarre behavior worsened. Fearful of touching any surface that had been touched by other people, Adam would never open doors with his bare hand, and would only touch doorknobs with a sterilized napkin.
The noise of other children in the school also proved to be extremely distressing to Lanza, who would develop chronic anxiety attacks - at times so severe that he would be hospitalized.
At home, Adam's behavior would hardly improve. He would frequently wash his hands and change his clothes up to 20 times each day, forcing his mother to do multiple loads of laundry daily, and he often went multiple days in a row without speaking a single word to anyone.
Psychiatrists would later diagnose Adam with severe Asperger's Syndrome, and would prescribe him medication to control his anxiety, but it would do little to help the young boy. By eighth grade, Adam Lanza became too unstable to continue attending school, and his mother instead decided to homeschool him. Lanza earned a GED and performed well academically, but after schooling the young man lingered without purpose, never going to college and never making any effort to find employment.
Lanza also became severely anorexic as he grew older, to the point of having a staggeringly low BMI of 13.9 - enough to cause brain damage from chemical imbalance. This eating disorder likely contributed to Lanza's overall mental decline - a decline his family seemed unaware of.
When Adam was 17, his mother and father divorced, citing "irreconcilable differences". The troubled young man did not handle the drastic change in his life well, and Nancy Lanza reported that her son's reclusive and bizarre behavior intensified following the divorce.
Apparently blaming him for turning his life upside down, Adam cut all ties with his father and opted to stay with his mother. Nancy Lanza made off well during the divorce settlement, and she used the money she had to purchase a modest home in the Newtown suburbs, isolated at the end of a long driveway. There, Nancy and Adam would live together, though Adam preferred to spend his time alone in the basement, playing video games. He would rarely leave the house, and when he did he had very few friends to meet with.
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| Adam Lanza's bedroom at his mother's home in Newtown, CT. Lanza taped black trash bags over the windows and would rarely leave his room except to eat and go to the bathroom. |
Instead, Adam turned to the internet, creating various profiles on numerous websites and forums to discuss a wide variety of topics. Adam's subjects of interest ranged from the mundane to the bizarre. Sometimes he would discuss obscure philosophies, such as philistinism, antinatalism (opposition to having children), and primitivism. Other times, he would show a worrying obsession with mass shooters.
From 2009, using the online name "Smiggles", Lanza posted on forums that discussed mass shooters, even creating a giant spreadsheet containing the names and kill counts of some infamous gunmen. In addition, Lanza created a Wikipedia account under the name "Kaynbred", which he used to edit a variety of articles on mass killers and spree shooters.i
Lanza also developed a bizarre obsession with pedophilia - a topic he discussed a great deal with others online and often tried to tie back with his obscure philosophical theories. "I don't think there should be any age of consent", he wrote on one such forum. On another forum, Lanza used grotesque pedophiliac metaphors when discussing his antinatalist and primitivist beliefs.
"Literature is simply another coping mechanism for children who've been mindfucked by the culturapists [sic]", he wrote. "They're carried to other worlds in the stream of semen".
Lanza also created a YouTube account under the name "CulturalPhilistine", which consisted of Lanza's audio-recorded quasi-philosophical screeds in which he attempted, among other things, to dispel notions that pedophilia was "harmful" to children.
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| Adam Lanza ran a YouTube channel - which was only recently uncovered - under the name "CulturalPhilistine", in which he uploaded audio recordings of bizarre, raving screeds about a variety of obscure topics - mainly centered around pedophilia. Investigators would later find a trove of child pornography on Lanza's computer. |
"Okay, let's say children are completely asexual, and that they don't have any desires for sex. Why would that indicate that it's abusive for them to engage in it?", he said in one such video. "Let's say there's some child who doesn't like football at all, and has no interest in it, but there is this adult he likes and for whatever reason he agrees to play football with the adult, even though the child has no interest in it. How is that abusive? I mean, it's just the child who likes the adult going along with the ride because he likes associating with the adult, and it isn't harmful at all, but somehow when it comes to sex it's somehow dangerous? Even if they have no interest in it, it's pretty fucking obvious they can enjoy it. It's pretty obvious they have an interest, and society tries to suppress it [...] There's no manipulation going on."
In 2009 - the same year Lanza started exploring the internet - an incident took place in Connecticut that would make international news. In Stamford, Connecticut, a domesticated chimpanzee named Travis viciously mauled a woman who was visiting his owner's house, blinding her and leaving her horrifically disfigured, before a responding police officer shot and killed the chimp.
Lanza became obsessed with the incident, and seemed to have a great deal of sympathy for Travis. On internet forums, Lanza often made a point to bring up Travis as an example of the horrors of "human culture", blaming "society at large" for the chimp's rampage.
In 2011, Lanza called into an Oregon-based anarchist radio station and discussed Travis at length, describing the chimpanzee as having been "raised as a human" and thus was "not much different than a mentally handicapped human child".
"Every human child is born in a chimp-like state", Lanza explained, "and civilization is only sustained by conditioning them for years on end."
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| Adam Lanza's obsession with Travis the chimp was often reflected in his online postings. Lanza often discussed Travis and chimpanzees on online forums under the alias "Smiggles". |
"Dismissing Travis' attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best", he went on. "His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation for, and actual humans - I just don't think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that."
It was a hauntingly prophetic statement - and probably the earliest indication of what Lanza was slowly becoming. His inarticulate internet tirades and disturbing obsessions would continue for the next year.
Arsenal
Adam Lanza was not the only member of his family involved in dangerous obsessions. In their Newtown home, Nancy had continued to indulge in a dangerous obsession of her own: firearms. It was an obsession that had its roots in a traumatic incident Nancy had endured almost thirty years earlier.
In the 1980s, Nancy Lanza had been walking in the streets of Boston, Massachusetts, when a knife-wielding assailant had mugged her in an alley. The mugger stole Nancy's wallet and purse, threatening to track her down and kill her if she ever reported the crime to the police.
Nancy reported the crime to authorities anyway, but, despite a police investigation, the mugger was never found. Paranoid that her assailant would one day follow through on his threat to kill her, Nancy Lanza became obsessed with survivalism and firearms. Over the next twenty years, Nancy would purchase over 20 different firearms, several bayonets, and a samurai sword.
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| Nancy Lanza in an undated photograph. In the 1980s, Nancy had been assaulted by a mugger in Boston, an incident which left her traumatized and sparked an obsession with firearms and survivalism. It was an obsession that would later contribute to her death. |
Nancy would not only train herself how to use guns, but she would also train her two sons to defend their mother from any threat. Nancy took her sons to shooting ranges, taught them how to load and clean firearms, and trained them how to reload their weapons in a speedy manner.
Though Ryan Lanza showed little interest in firearms, his younger brother shared in his mother's obsession. On different online forums, Adam would discuss the different weapons used in mass shootings, comparing their effectiveness and kill count.
There were some other, more private indicators that Adam made in the years prior to his rampage. In fifth grade, Lanza had written a disturbing story called "The Big Book of Granny", in which an old woman with a gun in her cane massacres scores of schoolchildren. He had, however, never shown the story to anyone.
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| When he was in fifth grade, Adam Lanza wrote a disturbing story called "The Big Book of Granny", in which a grandmother uses a gun hidden in her cane to massacre people. He never showed the story to anyone, though it was later found by investigators after the Sandy Hook massacre. |
Nobody knows exactly when Adam Lanza began planning the rampage that would make him infamous. Nobody knows what explicit warning signs - if any - he might have exhibited in the time leading up to December 14, 2012. The only person Lanza had any contact with for the last few months of his life was his mother.
If Nancy Lanza noticed anything unusual about her son's already bizarre behavior, she evidently never considered it to be serious. In the last months of her life, however, Nancy did voice concerns about her son to her close friends. Only a few days before her death, Nancy would confide in a close friend that she felt Adam was "slipping away", and that she believed she was the only person "keeping him tethered to this world".
But, unknown to Nancy Lanza, she had, by this point, already lost what little grip she had over her 20-year-old son's increasingly erratic behavior. The troubled son she had raised was already plotting to kill her and dozens of other innocent people.
December 14
Early on the morning of December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza awoke in his room. Every indication is that, by this point, he had already put together his plan to carry out a massacre.
Only one thing stood between Lanza and his planned rampage: his mother. Adam knew that his mother kept most of her firearms in her bedroom. If she awoke at any time while her son was loading up his car with weapons, she could foil his plot.
In a profound - and tragic - twist of irony, Nancy Lanza would become the first victim of the same son she had trained for years to protect her life from outside threats. She had never anticipated that the true threat to her life would come from inside her own home.
Sometime that morning, Adam Lanza retrieved a .22-caliber Savage Mk. II bolt-action rifle and quietly entered his mother's bedroom. Nancy Lanza was still asleep, totally oblivious to what was about to happen.
Adam Lanza held the rifle's barrel a few inches away from his mother's forehead and fired a round. Adam ejected the spent casing and fired a second time. Then he fired a third time. The fourth round he fired perforated Nancy's eyelid and lodged in her brain.
A neighbor later recalled hearing four sharp gunshots coming from the direction of the Lanza home that morning. Assuming it was from a nearby hunter, he never contacted police. He had no idea that Newtown had just suffered its first murder in nearly 20 years.
All four shots had each proven fatal. Nancy Lanza was dead - the first victim of a killing spree that would make Newtown infamous.
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| The .22-caliber Savage Mk. II bolt-action rifle Lanza used to kill his mother, discarded next to her bed. |
With his mother dead, Adam Lanza dropped the rifle to the floor and began to gather up his weapons. The killer dressed himself in a military-style uniform, wearing black tactical trousers, a tactical load-bearing vest, and an Australian "Booney hat".
From a gun closet, Lanza retrieved a 10mm Glock 20SF handgun, which he stored in a drop holster on his left hip, and a SIG Sauer P226 handgun, which he placed in his right pocket.
He then retrieved his favorite weapon of the family arsenal, a .223-caliber Bushmaster XM-15 E2S rifle; the civilian model of the US military's M4 rifle. Lanza loaded a "tactical magazine" (two 30-round magazines taped together for quick reloading) into the rifle and stored an additional eight 30-round magazines in the pockets of his vest, along with ammunition for his two pistols.
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| Adam Lanza took this self portrait in May of 2010, holding the same Bushmaster XM-15 rifle he would use in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School two years later. |
Lanza placed the Bushmaster rifle in the passenger seat of his 2010 Honda Civic, covering the rifle with a black jacket. The killer also wore a second black jacket over his ammunition vest to shield it from other drivers. Before leaving his house, Lanza stored a final weapon - a 12-gauge Saiga 12 semi-automatic shotgun, in the trunk of his car, along with two 20-round shotgun magazines.
After removing and smashing his computer's hard drive with the stock of his rifle, Lanza left his house for the last time. He left no suicide note, no final video, and no manifesto to explain his actions. Whatever motive the killer had for the violent actions he would carry out will forever remain shrouded in mystery.
The full details of the horror that unfolded at his next target, however, would not.
Bloodbath
It has been theorized by some that Lanza's original target may have been Newtown High School. A security camera later captured Lanza's black Honda Civic circling the school's parking lot for a few minutes before departing. If Lanza was planning to attack his old high school, he may have been deterred by the presence of a police van in the school's parking lot.
Instead, Adam decided to drive to Sandy Hook Elementary School - where he had once been a student. Classes at Sandy Hook had already started for the day, and the more than 400 students there were looking forward to the upcoming holiday vacation.
At approximately 9:35 AM, Adam Lanza parked his car in a fire lane a few yards from the entrance to Sandy Hook Elementary School. There were no witnesses to his arrival, and though the door to the school had been locked, there was no school resource officer present on campus that day. The school was utterly defenseless.
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| Lanza's 2010 Honda Civic, parked outside Sandy Hook Elementary School. A black jacket the shooter discarded before entering can be seen on the pavement. |
Lanza exited his car and took off his black jacket, discarding it on the ground. Retrieving his rifle from the passenger seat, he discarded a second jacket on the ground. The shooter left his Saiga 12 shotgun in the trunk of his SUV.
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| Adam Lanza left this 12-gauge Saiga 12 semi-automatic shotgun in the trunk of his car. He had apparently left it there in anticipation of a shootout with police, but no firefight happened. |
As Lanza walked towards the front entrance, he ejected a live round from the rifle onto the ground. Stopping at the locked door, Lanza briefly hesitated, then raised his rifle and fired eight rounds in a circular pattern into a window next to the entrance, shattering the glass and creating a gaping hole.
Lanza climbed through the hole in the glass, knocking over a potted plant as he did so.
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| Adam Lanza shot a hole through a window next to the entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School to bypass the building's locked doors. |
The crashing glass startled school secretary Barbara Halstead as she sat at her desk in the front office. "What was that?", called out nurse Sally Cox from the neighboring nurse's office. "I have no idea", Barbara replied as she stood up.
As Barbara peered at the entrance, she caught sight of a tall, black-clad figure climbing through a hole in the front window. "Sally...!", she yelled as she ducked down out of sight.
Sally Cox immediately sensed from her colleague's tone that something was wrong. The school nurse immediately climbed under her desk and hid.
Meanwhile, school principal Dawn Hochsprung - who had been in a meeting with a parent in a nearby conference room - stepped out into the hallway, followed by school psychologist Mary Sherlach and lead teacher Natalie Hammond. The three women caught sight of Lanza as he marched into the hall, rifle in hand.
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| Principal Dawn Hochsprung (left) and school psychologist Mary Sherlach (right) were killed as they confronted Adam Lanza in the hallway. |
"Shooter! Stay put!", Hochsprung yelled to her colleagues. She lunged towards the gunman, but Lanza aimed his rifle at the three teachers and fired seven shots in quick succession.
Hochsprung and Sherlach fell to the floor, dead, and Hammond - wounded once in the leg - collapsed and went down. A stray round ricocheted off the wall and struck substitute kindergarten teacher Deborah Pisani in the foot as she peered outside her classroom. She gasped in pain but quickly caught herself, retreated back inside, and locked the door.
Lanza marched up to the three downed teachers, aimed his rifle downward, and fired ten more shots into their bodies. He hit Hammond again, this time in the hand, but the teacher lay still and pretended to be dead.
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| The bodies of Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach (circled) can be seen lying outside Room 9 in this photograph. An easel was placed in front of the dead teachers by responding police officers to shield them from fleeing students. |
School janitor Rick Thorne spotted Lanza standing in the hallway. "Put the gun down!", he yelled to the shooter.
Lanza drew his Glock 20 pistol and fired a shot at Thorne, missing him and striking a closed door. The pistol jammed on the second round, and Lanza shoved it back into his holster as Thorne ran to safety and called police.
Stepping over the three fallen teachers, Lanza left the hallway and entered the main office. As he did so, the wounded Natalie Hammond took the opportunity to crawl back into the conference room and close the door.
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| The entrance to Room 9. Bloodstains left by wounded teacher Natalie Hammond can be seen in the doorway. |
Lanza walked past Barbara Halstead's desk and entered the nurse's office. Still hiding underneath her own desk, Sally Cox could see the shooter's black shoes coming closer and closer to her. She closed her eyes and held her breath as they came to a stop right in front of the desk.
Lanza did not notice either woman. He abruptly turned around and walked back out into the hallway, closing the office door behind him. Barbara Halstead reached up above the desk to grab a phone to call police. As she did so, she accidentally activated the school intercom. Suddenly, the entire school could hear the sounds of gunfire and Halstead's gasps for breath as she dialed 911.
Lanza came to a split in the hallway. To the right was the school auditorium, where a class of third graders had been rehearsing a school play. To the left was a row of first-grade classrooms, where multiple teachers and students were suddenly coming to the realization that their school was under attack.
Lanza turned left, walking past Room 12, where first-grade teacher Kaitlin Roig and her classroom of 15 students had begun hiding after hearing a barrage of gunshots.
Lanza came upon Room 10, where first-grade teacher Victoria Soto and her class were starting to begin their lockdown procedures. Soto was walking over to lock the door when Adam entered.
Immediately - and without speaking a word - the gunman walked forward, leveled his rifle and fired four shots into Victoria Soto's body, killing her instantly. The killer then turned his rifle towards the students and pulled the trigger. Click. The gunman was out of ammunition.
6-year-old Jesse Lewis emerged from hiding. "Run! Run!", he yelled to his classmates as Lanza ejected his magazine.
"Get the fuck over here!", Lanza yelled as eight students pushed past him and ran into the hallway, fleeing for their lives.
Lanza quickly turned his tactical magazine over, chambered a round, and fired a single shot into Jesse Lewis' forehead, killing the brave first-grader instantly. "You're an asshole!", Lanza snarled as the dead boy fell to the floor.
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| 6-year-old Jesse Lewis was urging his classmates to run for safety when he was fatally shot by Adam Lanza. This photo of Jesse Lewis was taken by his father that same morning as Jesse prepared to head to school. It was the last time Jesse's family would ever see him alive. |
Lanza stepped to the side to block the classroom door and continued firing. He first targeted special education teacher Ann-Marie Murphy, who threw herself in front of the gunman's rifle to shield 6-year-old student Dylan Hockley. It was to no avail. Lanza shot the teacher six times; the bullets killing both her and Hockley, and then proceeded to fire the remaining 23 rounds from his rifle at the other students still trapped inside. 6-year-olds Allison Wyatt and Avielle Richman were killed as they tried to run for cover, and as 6-year-old Olivia Engel tried to hide under the table she was hit in the neck by a rifle round.
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| The victims killed in Room 10. Top row (left to right): Jesse Lewis, Dylan Hockley, Allison Wyatt, Avielle Richman, and Olivia Engel, all 6-years-old. Bottom row: Victoria Leigh Soto, 27,and Anne-Marie Murphy, 52. |
Lanza dropped his empty tactical magazine and inserted a fresh magazine, again ejecting a live round onto the floor. The gunman left Room 10 and walked back into the hallway.
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| The dual-taped "tactical magazine" Lanza discarded on the floor of Room 10. A live round ejected from the gun can be seen next to it. |
Just one classroom over, in Room 8, substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau and her assistant teacher, Rachel D'Avino, were frantically trying to cram their 16 first-grade students in the bathroom. They weren't fast enough, and with all the students crammed into a small space, the results would prove devastating.
The time was 9:37 AM. Lanza had been shooting for just under two minutes. The deadliest part of the massacre was about to occur.
Lanza opened the door to Room 8 - where he had once been a student 10 years earlier - and shot Rousseau twice, killing her instantly. He then turned his rifle towards the bathroom and began rapidly firing a barrage of rounds at the helpless children as he marched forward. Lanza would fire all 29 rounds from his magazine in approximately 10 seconds.
Out of ammunition, Lanza dropped his empty magazine to the ground, jammed a fresh magazine into his rifle, and again ejected a live round onto the floor.
"Help me! I don't want to be here", yelled one boy.
"Well, you're here!", Lanza sneered as he aimed and began firing rapidly again. Lanza fired an additional 19 rounds from his rifle into the huddled mass of children before his overheating rifle jammed, failing to feed a new round into the chamber.
The gunman ejected the magazine with ten rounds remaining, inserted a fresh one, and resumed firing at near point-blank range. There was nowhere for Lanza's victims to run. They were huddled together and cornered. The gunman could not miss. The classroom was a literal killing zone.
Lanza rapidly fired another 17 rounds from his XM-15 before his rifle again jammed, suffering from another failure-to-feed. The gunman ejected the magazine with thirteen rounds remaining, inserted another magazine, and, now only inches from his victims, began again rapidly firing rounds at point-blank range.
Bullets tore through bodies and slammed into the classroom wall, clouding the air with smoke and covering the XM-15's barrel with shredded tile dust. After firing an additional 15 rounds, Lanza's overheating gun again jammed. The damage, however, was done.
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| The barrel of Lanza's XM-15 rifle. The gunman was firing at such close range in Room 8 that dust from shredded wall coated the muzzle of his weapon. |
The entire massacre in Room 8 had been devastating. Lanza had fired a total of 80 rounds in approximately 45 seconds.
14 children lay dead; Charlotte Bacon, Madeleine Hsu, Daniel Barden, Josephine Gay, Chase Kowalski, Ana Marquez-Greene, Catherine Hubbard, Emilie Parker, Noah Pozner, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Jack Pinto, Caroline Previdi, and Jessica Rekos. One other student, Benjamin Wheeler, lay fatally wounded.
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| The victims killed in Room 8 (left to right): Charlotte Bacon, Madeleine Hsu, Daniel Barden, Josephine Gay, Chase Kowalski, Ana-Marquez Greene, Catherine Hubbard, Emilie Parker, Noah Pozner, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Jack Pinto, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Benjamin Wheeler, Lauren Rousseau, and Rachel D'Avino. |
Only one girl - smeared in blood and pieces of flesh beneath the mound of bodies - lay unharmed amidst the carnage, playing dead as she hid amongst the corpses of her murdered classmates.
Lanza stumbled out of Room 8, coughing and gagging as the hallway filled with smoke. His XM-15 rifle had jammed from repeated firing and was beginning to malfunction. Lanza ejected four rounds onto the floor outside the classroom as he struggled to clear his weapon, finally discarding the partially-empty magazine on the floor. He once again reloaded the rifle with a new magazine and chambered a round.
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| The hallway outside of Room 8. Lanza discarded four live rounds and a partially-empty magazine on the floor as he tried to clear his jammed rifle. |
Lanza was not finished. He wanted to continue the killing spree. His inexplicable bloodlust was still not satisfied. The gunman ran down the hall to a music classroom, where music teacher Maryrose Kristopik had barricaded the door shut, turned off the lights, and was hiding with her students in a supply closet.
"Let me in!", Lanza yelled as he pounded on the door. "Let me in!". The teacher and students wisely ignored him and remained silent.
As Lanza pounded on the door, he heard the sound of police sirens coming from the parking lot. Several patrol officers from the Newtown Police Department had arrived on scene and were establishing a perimeter. Two officers carefully approached the school's entrance with their guns drawn, ready to confront the shooter.
Lanza retreated back into Room 10, where Victoria Soto, Ann-Marie Murphy, and four of their students lay dead. Most of the surviving students had fled outside and run to a neighbor's house to take refuge. Only two students remained in the classroom - hiding in the bathroom. Fortunately for them, Lanza never entered the restroom.
Lanza walked over to the windows and began firing his XM-15 out the window into the parking lot in staggered succession. The gunman wasn't aiming for anyone in particular - he was simply shooting at several parked cars. After firing 15 shots, Lanza's rifle again jammed. The gunman loudly swore in frustration as he threw the malfunctioning weapon to the ground.
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| Lanza blindly fired fifteen rounds out the windows of Room 10, aiming into the parking lot. Nobody was wounded in this final barrage of gunfire. |
Lanza knew his rampage was over. With his rifle inoperable, the gunman would be vastly outmatched if he decided to take on the police in a firefight. On internet forums, Lanza had previously mocked mass shooters who had allowed themselves to be captured, and he had no intention of being taken alive.
From his drop holster, Lanza drew his 10mm Glock, which had jammed from when he first fired it in the hallway. The gunman ejected four rounds from the handgun onto the floor as he struggled to get his pistol into operation. Finally, Lanza managed to chamber a round. His rampage complete, the murderer pointed the gun into his mouth and fired one final shot.
The 10mm bullet tore into Lanza's brain and exited out the other side, splattering blood and pieces of brain matter onto the classroom whiteboard. The gunman slumped to the floor by the classroom entrance, dead.
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| Adam Lanza's black "Booney" hat. A bullet hole, smeared with blood and hair, can be seen in the hat - the result of Lanza's self-inflicted gunshot wound. |
The time was 9:40:03 AM. Just four and a half minutes after entering the school, Adam Lanza's rampage was over. He had fired a total of 156 rounds; 154 from his rifle and two from his pistol. 26 children and teachers lay dead or dying.
But the horror of the day was far from over.
Carnage
Outside the school, a group of Newtown police officers and Connecticut State Troopers were advancing towards the shattered entrance, guns drawn. The two officers had heard Lanza's final volley of gunfire as he shot out the windows of Victoria Soto's classroom, but they had no idea if the gunman was dead or was lying in wait to ambush them.
The officers entered the front hallway and came upon the school janitor, Rick Thorne, who had returned from warning other classrooms about the active shooter.
The officers immediately trained their weapons on Thorne. "Put your hands up!", they yelled.
Thorne dropped to his knees. "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!", he responded.
"Put your hands up! Hands up now!", the police repeated.
"I am the janitor. I work here. I am the janitor", Thorne pleaded. The officers frisked the janitor before determining he wasn't armed. He was allowed to leave the school.
The officers found the bodies of Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach lying outside the conference area in Room 9. They placed an easel in front of the downed teachers to shield them from evacuating students. Inside Room 9, they found Natalie Hammond bleeding from two gunshot wounds to the leg and hand, and began to administer first aid.
A pair of policemen entered Room 10, where - amidst the bodies of Victoria Soto, Ann Marie Murphy, and five students - they found Adam Lanza lying dead on the floor in a fetal position, surrounded by spent shell casings and weapons. The officers handcuffed the dead murderer and secured his weapons.
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| The entrance to Room 10. The 10mm Glock pistol Lanza used to kill himself can be seen lying on the floor just beyond the doorway. |
Underneath a table in the corner of Soto's classroom, Newtown police officer William Chapman found 6-year-old Olivia Engel lying in a pool of blood. She had been shot in the neck and was unresponsive, but had a weak heartbeat and was faintly breathing.
Immediately, the officer scooped the tiny child into his arms and ran from the classroom, heading out the front entrance.
"I need an ambulance! Someone get me an ambulance!", Officer Chapman yelled towards the crowd of emergency services gathering in the parking lot as he carried the wounded child outside.
"You're going to be okay, sweetie. You're gonna be okay.", the officer comforted the little girl in his arms as he choked back tears. "Your mommy and daddy love you. It's going to be okay."
"I need a fucking ambulance!", the officer screamed again. "Someone get me an ambulance!"
A paramedic arrived to take Olivia Engel from Officer Chapman. The critically-wounded girl was loaded into an ambulance to be taken to Danbury Hospital. Tragically, the six-year-old would not survive. Despite the best efforts of paramedics, Olivia Engel would be declared dead on arrival at the emergency room.
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| Police officer William Chapman carries the dying Olivia Engel from Sandy Hook Elementary School. Despite the best efforts of paramedics, the 6-year-old girl would succumb to her injuries at Danbury Hospital shortly afterwards. |
Back inside the school, a group of Connecticut State Troopers opened the door to Room 8 and were confronted with an unimaginable sight. Dozens of corpses lay dead in a mass of shredded flesh, severed limbs, and blood. The children were piled on top of one another, in the bathroom, their bodies mutilated by repeated gunshots from a high-velocity rifle. The scene was nightmarish even for these experienced professionals who had seen their share of murders in the past.
Several officers became sick and ran outside to vomit. Others immediately broke into tears and began to weep.
In the midst of the carnage, officers discovered one girl lying in the bathroom, unhurt but in a state of shock and covered with blood. She was quickly ushered out of the room. When she saw her mother, the girl exclaimed "Mommy, I'm okay, but all my friends are dead."
Amidst the pile of bodies, officers discovered 6-year-old Benjamin Wheeler was still barely alive, but seriously wounded by multiple gunshots. He was rushed to an ambulance and taken to the hospital but, like Olivia Engel, the young boy died shortly afterwards from his injuries.
In the aftermath of the shooting, there was much speculation regarding the lack of emergency vehicles at Sandy Hook. In fact, only two of those shot that day at Sandy Hook - Natalie Hammond and Deborah Pisani - would survive. The lack of ambulances at the scene would later, disgustingly, be used by conspiracy theorists as "proof" that the shooting was a hoax perpetrated by the federal government.
The answer, of course, is obvious to any of those who saw the carnage wrought by Adam Lanza inside Rooms 10 and 8. The .223-caliber bullet used in the XM-15 rifle that Lanza carried that day is designed for use on the battlefield. The high-velocity round is designed to penetrate armor and inflict massive damage on its target. At Sandy Hook, it did exactly that - except instead of enemy soldiers on a battlefield, the victims were innocent 6 and 7-year-old children in a first-grade classroom.
I want to highlight the devastation that the AR-15 and its derivatives like the XM-15 can inflict, because I feel it has been lost on a lot of observers who discuss these shootings. This is something I cannot sanitize. What follows in the next paragraph is extremely graphic, but it - more than anything - shows just how much carnage was inflicted by Adam Lanza that day at Sandy Hook, with a rifle he should have never been able to have.
The victims at Sandy Hook weren't just murdered; they were horrifically mutilated beyond recognition. All but two of the victims who died that day were shot multiple times by rounds designed to devastate their victims. Though details of most of the victims' injuries remains shrouded in secrecy, the family of Noah Pozner - who died in Room 8 - has revealed the 6-year-old was shot eleven times. The boy's jaw and left hand were completely torn off and pulverized by the high-powered bullets, and were found scattered around the room in pieces.
There was nothing any of the officers could have done to save those who had been blown to pieces by the gunman's rifle. They knew were dead. There was no first aid to be performed, no life-saving medical treatment to be administered. They were dead.
156 rounds had been fired over approximately four-and-a-half minutes. 26 lives had been extinguished. That was all it took to inflict carnage on an unimaginable scale.
And, tragically, Sandy Hook would not be the last time such carnage would be wrought on children.
The Plague of Bullets
It has been nearly ten years since the massacre at Sandy Hook. In those ten years, America has suffered an ongoing epidemic of mass shootings - 288 of them at schools. Just four years ago, in the aftermath of the massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I discussed the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School and explained what could be done to prevent (or mitigate) further shootings.
And, well, here we are again. Another horrific massacre by a madman with an assault rifle. Dozens of more dead children and teachers. And still it seems that nothing is going to be done.
In fact, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook - despite countless efforts by the Obama administration and the Democratic Party - no comprehensive federal gun control legislation was passed. Even the slaughter of 20 children and 6 teachers at an elementary school wasn't enough to loosen the gun lobby's grip on Congress.
The only state, in fact, that passed any comprehensive legislation in the aftermath of Sandy Hook was Connecticut itself, which went from having some of the most permissive gun laws in the US to having one of the strictest.
Following the massacre in Newtown, the Connecticut legislature passed laws that banned the sale of "assault weapons", expanded the scope of background checks, created a registry of individuals convicted of crimes involving firearms, and prohibited the sale of ammunition magazines that hold more than ten rounds. Magazines and rifles owned before the ban went into effect would be grandfathered in, but owners would be required to register them with the state government. Failure to do so would be a felony punishable by imprisonment and a hefty fine.
Connecticut learned from the tragedy at Sandy Hook, but, unfortunately, it appears that the state of Texas is less likely to follow suit in the wake of its latest tragedy in Uvalde. Texas governor Greg Abbott has long been a staunch opponent of gun control measures. During his term as governor, Abbott has signed bills loosening laws regarding background checks, relaxing requirements to issue gun licenses, and rejecting any attempts by lawmakers to restrict the sale of firearms.
Even now, gun control opponents are still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the very real and very present threat of gun violence. And it's a stubbornness that appears to be infecting both sides of the political spectrum.
In the aftermath of the massacre at Robb Elementary School, commentators on the right have been blaming the usual scapegoats of "violent video games" and a vaguely-defined "mental health crisis", and commentators on the left have blamed the Uvalde Police Department, smearing them as "cowards" for not intervening to take down the shooter - despite the fact that the UPD did, in fact, intervene early on in the crisis and exchange fire with the gunman, and was unable to reach the shooter quickly due to a barricaded steel door.
The problem is not cops. The problem is not "violent video games" or a "mental health crisis" - the latter of which Republicans have shown no indication they care about anyway. The problem is guns. The problem always has been guns, and the problem always will be guns.
And let's not pretend gun control legislation doesn't work. When it has been implemented, it has produced clear results. In 1994, the Clinton Administration enacted the Assault Weapons Ban, which prohibited the import of multiple types of weapons and high-capacity magazines into the United States. Though the ban did not prevent all mass shootings - both the North Hollywood shootout and the Columbine massacre occurred during the ban - the number of mass shootings declined significantly during the ten-year period the ban was in place.
Unfortunately, the ban expired in 2004, and the Bush Administration opted not to renew it. Since the ban expired, mass shootings - and gun deaths overall - have been increasing at a rapid rate. And they will continue to occur at a staggering frequency until something - anything - is finally done.
Even as I was writing this article, the string of mass shootings did not stop. Just a few days prior, multiple people were shot and one person was killed in a shooting at a high school graduation in New Orleans. The day before that, at least six people were shot in prolonged gunfight between two rival gangs in Chattanooga. This problem is not going away, and it will not go away unless our legislators finally do something to address this senseless epidemic of gun violence.
Thoughts and prayers will not fix this. Uvalde was not the first time children were slaughtered at an elementary school, and it will not be the last. This will happen again. This plague will continue to claim untold numbers of innocent lives. And it is a plague that is entirely and completely avoidable.
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A special thanks to CW Wade at sandyhookfacts.com for his forensic analysis of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
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In memoriam:
Rachel D'Avino, 29
Dawn Hochsprung, 47
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Leigh Soto, 27
Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison Wyatt, 6
Nancy Lanza, 52
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