10 years after Sandy Hook: More mass shootings, America stumbling with gun control

The crime was so unthinkable that it left the president weeping and prompted a traumatized Connecticut community to raze the building where it happened.

A 20-year-old man toting three guns, including a semiautomatic rifle, stormed into a grade school and methodically shot 20 children and six educators dead. Christmastime in Sandy Hook would never be the same.

The slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on a chilly day 10 years ago did not prompt any radical redrawing of America’s relationship with guns or school safety.

As the U.S. honors the grim anniversary of the 2012 shooting, it looks back on a decade that saw rising regularity of mass shootings, culminating in an echo last spring: the fatal shooting of 19 students at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The 10 years are speckled with devastating days: Seventeen dead by gunfire at a high school in Parkland, Fla. Forty-nine perished at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Sixty killed after a gunman perched in a high-rise hotel rained bullets on a Las Vegas concert.

On the day it happened, the Sandy Hook shooting was America’s second deadliest ever. Now, four other shootings match or exceed its dismal death toll. Thousands more mass shootings have been recorded in the U.S. in the last decade.

Lawmakers in Washington long displayed paralysis in response to the drumbeat. But after the Uvalde shooting and a rifle-powered racist massacre in Buffalo this year, a bipartisan, Democratic-led coalition moved with surprising speed to pass America’s most significant gun control law in 30 years.

“God willing, it’s going to save a lot of lives,” President Biden said in June as he signed the law, which expanded background checks for gun buyers and supported states’ so-called red flag laws, which are meant to prevent dangerous people from possessing firearms.

To gun safety advocates, the work remains unfinished.

The renewal of a national assault weapons ban that lasted from 1994 to 2004 remains elusive, and states’ gun rules are an often flimsy patchwork. The Supreme Court aggressively expanded federal gun rights in June, striking down a century-old New York law regulating concealed carry handgun licenses.

But the full legacy of Sandy Hook is hardly one of feeble inaction.

More than 20 groups, spanning from gun safety activism to community healing, cropped up after the massacre. As the Sandy Hook community digested its grief and moved forward — a new school with bulletproof windows replaced the old one in 2016 — the deadly trial touched off national efforts to make America safer.

“We have passed hundreds of good gun laws all across the country, and we’ve changed policies at the school board and city council level,” said Shannon Watts, who founded a gun safety group one day after she cried watching the Sandy Hook horror from her home in Indiana.

Watts’ organization, Moms Demand Action, blossomed from a Facebook page into a powerful political force. It boasts nearly 10 million supporters, and 140 of its volunteers won elected office in last month’s elections, the group said.

Moms Demand Action and other Sandy Hook-inspired groups appear to have slowly loosened the gun lobby’s grip on the GOP.

Fourteen House Republicans joined Democrats to pass the federal gun control law this year. Fifteen GOP Senate members did, too, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

“A decade after the horrific Sandy Hook shooting, our grief remains for the innocent lives lost, but so does our resolve,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a statement. “While there is more work to do, there are also more and more Americans joining with us to get it done.”

The political victories have come against a bloody backdrop. In 2020, gun-related injuries became the leading cause of death for children and teens, according to a New England Journal of Medicine analysis. The carnage at Sandy Hook was the tip of a tragic iceberg.

Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit launched by victims’ family members, has established school violence prevention programs that it said have engaged more than 23,000 schools and 18 million participants.

The efforts may save lives. But they cannot bring back the small students lost on Dec. 14, 2012. They would now be teenagers.

That day, a shaken President Barack Obama, wiping tears from his eyes in the White House briefing room, said he felt “overwhelming grief.”

“This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we’ll tell them that we love them,” he said, referring to the first lady and his two daughters. “There are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight.”

“They need all of us right now,” Obama said. “In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans.”

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Some Americans rallied in support of the families. Pro-gun groups pushed hard to oppose any strict regulations on firearms. On the far-right fringe, conspiracy theories presented the shooting as a hoax.

Alex Jones, the “Infowars” host and leading purveyor of ghastly lies about Sandy Hook, insisted for years that the shooting was fabricated by the government.

Families of eight victims sued Jones, and two months ago, a jury in Connecticut found that he should pay nearly $1 billion in damages.

The trial, held about 20 miles from the attack, revealed stories of startling indignities experienced by victims’ families. One father said people had urinated on his son’s grave.

At a benefit event last week, Obama described Dec. 14, 2012, as the “single darkest day” of his presidency. He said that he did not know how the families of victims coped, but that they carried the “weight with strength and with grace.”

The former president celebrated their work to turn pain into change. But he said Americans should remain outraged.

“I still feel anger,” Obama said. “The good news is that of late, I’ve sensed that slowly, steadily, the tide may be turning — that we’re not just condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.”