“It’s almost an instant replay”

In 2012, the shooting of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the worst elementary school shooting in U.S. history, terrified the country and its leaders.

Nearly a decade later, as he watched the rising death toll following Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the father of the Sandy Hook victim felt defeat.

“I think it’s something in society that we know is going to happen over and over again,” said Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was killed in a shooting in 2012.

Heslin said he was “forced” to watch the coverage.

“It’s almost an instant replay of Sandy Hook,” he said.

That replay, he predicted, will include a revived debate about gun law, and while that comes after most high-profile mass shootings, it becomes more warm after the school massacres.

Dozens of mass shootings have occurred since Sandy Hook, including the 2018 shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the same year shooting that killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School. in New Mexico.

There were so many school shootings, in fact, that some Sandy Hook families said they could predict the nation’s reaction, which Veronique De La Rosa, mother of Noah Pozner, the youngest boy to die in Newtown, described Tuesday as “ unfortunately, a state of paralysis. ”

Because they involve children, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe and now Uvalde have sparked intense debate on gun policy and new laws.

Even in Texas, a state with some of the most permissible gun laws in the country, mass hunting has generated support for a computation.

The National Rifle Association, whose political and financial power helped ensure the defeat of a gun law package after Sandy Hook, is a weak organization.

But the political forces that condemned even the relatively modest law that restricted background checks and banned high -capacity gun magazines still remain.

When asked his prediction about what the country might expect after Uvalde, Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the Sandy Hook hunt, described it as “dark“.

“I can’t help but think it’s going to follow exactly the same pattern as everything else,” Parker said.

However, families point out bright areas for them.

After Parkland, the students who survived the hunt formed a strong and angry movement.

groups such as Moms Demand Actionfounded after Sandy Hook, has entered the state and local levels.

The Sandy Hook families have won half a dozen libel lawsuits against conspiracy theorists, as the disinformation campaigns mass shootings and attacks on survivors have been part of the rejection of the new gun law.

Earlier this year, Sandy Hook’s relatives won a record $ 73 million settlement from insurers for Remington, the maker of the AR-15 rifle used in hunting.

Remington’s success, which has inspired several similar lawsuits against gun makers, attacks a 2005 law that protects gun makers from liability after mass shootings, an NRA -supported measure called by De La Rosa that “a great injustice”.

“It’s a public safety epidemic,” De La Rosa said Tuesday.

“Our priorities are too twisted as a society. However, there are ways to correct the ship.”

Elizabeth Williamson is the author of “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth” and has spent the last four years reporting on the outcome of the Newtown massacre and families fighting against misinformation.

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