Critical Analysis Of The Sandy Hook School Shooting

The Sandy Hook massacre also, described as one of the deadliest shooting in all U.S history. 20 children and 6 adults were killed on December of 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. (Connecticut) This massacre was the earliest memory I could recall on gun violence, not just learning about it but also watching it unfold and be told on news outlets all over television and social media. The Sandy Hook massacre shaped my generation by creating a more debatable topic on gun control in the United States. Through the Sociological point of view, gun violence can be understood by the functionalism, conflict, and symbolic theoretical approach. While trying to understand such event with such theories, we begin to unfold how society has shifted and changed over time, how we as a society view gun violence today and what we have done to prevent such act to happen again.

"First, there's the shooting." On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and took 26 lives, most of them belonging to children. Sadly, too many situations similar to this have occurred prior to and since. In January 2013, Stephen King published an extended essay called Guns exploring the issue of gun violence in the United States.

Over the past couple of decades, school shooting have seemed to occur often-- continuously shocking the nation and reminding everyone that no community is exempt from such horror. One main contributor of this hysteria is found within the media. At the catalyst of this hysteria, lies the horrific Columbine shooting in 1999. Since then, school shootings have received ample coverage-- some argue that this has romanticized school shootings, others argue that is has provided condemning coverage of the often insane perpetrators. In the first year after the Columbine shooting, over 10,000 articles were written about the event, likely setting the stage for the nationwide desire for constant coverage of such events (Elsass et al, p. 445-446).

Sandy Hook was a chaotic town on December 14, 2012 where gunman, Adam Lanza, shot and killed twenty children and six staff members. Many family members of the victims are still mourning the loss of their children and loved ones. Over 500 lives were affected after this tragedy (Gay). The author gives an interview of the superintendent of the school in which he shows what he did after he heard the news of the shooting. “I was in the district office and my secretary told me the bus company reported a

By this time Klebold and Harris had both taken their life and at least 75 police officers were surrounding Columbine High School. About two hours later, the SWAT team entered the east side of the building finding injured victims waiting for assistance. Teacher David Sanders was shot and had been bleeding for three hours before getting help (Kohn). “Sanders was the last of 15 people to die at Columbine that day. Twenty-three wounded were taken to hospitals. Six had brain or spinal injuries. Several nearly bled to death. Doctors at six hospitals worked on wounded children all through the night, and saved every one of them.” (Kohn).

  Mass media's vital role in the public perception of school shootings is seen as a social problem, and social scientists

In the United States mass shootings has been a problem for the last few years especially school shootings which occurs often in the country. Why in this country? Well statistics shows that the United States has 31% of all public mass shootings from 1966 to 2012. Although, the percentage has gone up for the last five years. There is a higher risk of dying at school than at any public places. The government and the president of the United States are not treating this problem right and it has become a phenomenon in the country. According to the blog “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother: A Mom’s Perspective On the Mental Illness Conversation In America” by Liza Long, she discusses her struggles with her mentally ill son and states the lack of help she was getting. She addresses the Sandy Hook incident in Newtown, Connecticut to relate it to her situation and how she fears her son might lead to murderous attack like the Sandy Hook shooting. Many of the causes that lead to school shootings are; lack of gun control, mental health & bullying, and definitely lack of protection at schools.

The occurence of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. The gunman, was 20-year-old Adam Lana, who first shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. He then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where he fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. As first responders arrived, Lana committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The shooting began at approximately 9:30 a.m. Sandy Hook was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school in U.S. history and the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. This shooting yet again assured the nation that gun violence is still as big of a problem as it was back in the late 90’s when 27 teenagers got killed in another mass killing in Columbine, Colorado. We as a nation must stand up and oppose mass murdering because these actions are not only unjust but inhuman as well.  The increase in gun violence can be decreased by, identifying the regions in the country where the most gun violence occurs and restricting their access to limiting or monitoring the availability of guns and ammunition.

There has been an average of one school shooting every week in America since the Sandy Hook shooting. On the fourteenth of December, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, 20-year-old Adam Lanza not only killed his mother in her home, but also twenty children and six members of staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. This was to be the third deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The Huffington Post reports that as of 2014, there have been over 200 school shootings. These have resulted in at least 94 deaths and over 156 serious and minor injuries. And, with an issue as emotive and contentious as the murder of school children, the question has been frequently asked: why do school shootings happen?

Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders and six adults. The shooter aged 20, Adam Lanza, killed himself after committing his crime. All of the guns and ammunitions were bought by Lanza’s mother. Adam Lanza stole the firearms and committed his crime.

In February 2012, Thomas Lane shot three people at the Ohio Chardon High School. Lane had stolen the 22-caliber handgun from his uncle, who purchased it legally. In October 2011, eight people were killed by Scott Evans Dekraai in Seal Beach, California. He used a number of different guns, all legally purchased. He had a restraining order that had banned him from purchasing any guns just a year earlier, but it had expired by the time of the shooting, allowing him to legally purchase his guns. In July 2012, James Holmes killed 12 people in Aurora, Colorado at a movie theater. He had legally purchased several guns, all from licensed dealers, passing background checks for each. Not a single gun, from any of these men, was bought illegally and in each case the killer completely followed the law. The Sandy Hook killing involved children, making it harder to hear, but the fact didn’t change that the mass shootings and private sales have almost nothing to do with each other. (Cooke 1)

American society is prone to violence and no one is safe from the possibility of becoming a victim to crime. Every day the news covers stories that is filled with public violence or the brutal death of someone. Some believe that people commit crimes with the belief that they will not get caught. Other expect the violence and have become resilient to bad news. Society wants to understand the insanity of criminals. Many perpetrators kill themselves after taking the lives of others, therefore, the idea of questioning them or assessing them to acquire reasoning that will define their actions are forfeited. Adam Lanza, the shooter in the Sandy Hook massacre kills himself as first responders close in to arrest him is a prime example of being

On December 14, 2012 Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and started shooting. Before he even walked into the school he had already killed his mother Nancy Lanza. He shot her in the head and them left her home to go to Sandy Hook. That is how Adam Lanza’s day started and it got worse from there. Police don’t know what triggered the events that happened that day, but they do that he had a lot of mental diseases and he was also anorexic. Police do know that he planned the event out because he studied books about mass murders and played video games on school shootings. He didn’t plan what he was going to do when he walked inside Sandy Hook all he knew was that he was going to try and shoot someone. Adam Lanza acted alone in the

Sandy Hook Elementary School fell vitctim to a violent shotting attack on December 14, 2012. Gunman, Adam Lanza, was known to have claimed 26 victims. 20 of which, were children. It is my belief that had teachers in the school been armed and trained for these unfortuante attacks, the outcome of victims wouldn't have tolled so high. "Among the dead were popular principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, who rushed toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him and paid with their lives; Victoria Soto, a 27-year-old teacher who died while trying to hide her pupils; 30-year-old Lauren Rousseau, a teacher thrilled to have been hired this year, and Ana Marquez-Greene, a 6-year-old girl who had just moved to Newtown from Canada" (McLaughlin, 2012).

A current most spoken issue among the public media is gun violence or mass shooting however the crime is not as many as it was twenty years ago. The term mass shooting does not have an official set of definition yet, but the term indicates crime which is killing as many people as possible in a short time frame. The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines it as “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” (Sam Brock, Rachel Witte, and Joe Rojas). A mass shooting can begin due to several reasons: it could be background history, media, despair, or something else. Nico Lang, the author of America’s White Masculinity Complex and The Myth of The “Senseless” Mass Shooting says, mass shooting can also be related to mental “functions like the specter of ‘mental illness.’” A number of mass shooters have serious, often undiagnosed mental problems. Are the mass media addressing the basic issue clearly? Of course, the media address the issue more than the violence expects to be addressed, but it is not overt enough. ….. By examining a variety of news media coverage on the subject of mass shooting, this essay concludes that when choosing stories to cover, the news media must take the general audience into consideration. Ultimately, what is at stake here is the media exaggerate the crime and report it disproportionally, and the distortion of reality can have variety of effects on the viewer or the general audience.