Twenty-eight people were killed, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school after a 20-year-old man went on a shooting rampage Friday.
The slayings happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a Patch town of about 28,000 people located an hour outside of Stamford. Newtown Police descended on the school around 9:30 a.m. after a 911 call.
At a Friday press conference, authorites said 20 children and seven adults were killed, in addition to the gunman. Other reports have said the school's principal and a school psychologist were among the dead.
The alleged shooter was armed with four guns and a high-powered assault rifle. Authorities are currently searching his father’s home in New Jersey as part of the investigation. The suspect's mother lives in Newtown and was a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has close to 600 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. She was among those killed, according to several news reports.
Police also have a second suspect in custody. According to eyewitness accounts, police found a man in the woods near the school wearing camouflage pants and took him in for questioning. As the man passed parents gathered near the school, he said, “I didn’t do it,” according to CBS News.
A parent interviewed on CBS News told the network his 8-year-old daughter said she heard an argument and cursing over the school’s loudspeaker, apparently coming from the principal’s office. Her teacher then immediately locked the classroom door as a safety precaution.
A fourth-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School told Connecticut’s Channel 7 that he and his classmates were “locked in a closet in the gym” to escape the gunman.
One mother of an 8-year-old girl at the school, Brenda Lebinski, told Patch her daughter is safe thanks to one teacher's decision to move all kids into a closet when a gunman had entered the building.
Authorities said the scene is now secure and there is no longer a threat to public safety. They will be providing more details and holding another press conference on the incident as soon as they notify the families of the victims.
Newtown is a Patch town, so we have editors and reporters on the ground providing constant updates. To follow the developments, visit the main story here.
Also, here's a link to a stream of photos and tweets from the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Feel free to share your thoughts in our comments section.
Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the wrong age for the apparent gunman. He was 20, not 24.
So here you are politicizing the "nanny state" agenda, instead. "If you think banning guns will stop the mentally disturbed from injuring or killing other people, then how would you address the stabbings in China? " I see your point, since people will simply use different weapons, all weapons should considered equally lethal. "With kitchen knive laws requiring waiting periods and permits?" Say, there's an idea. Yes, the same ones that are required to carry one in the Capitol shall be required to carry one on a school campus. To ensure that all permits are being carried,all laws complied, we can have the same checks in schools as we do at the Capitol. I want the same gun laws and freedoms/restrictions at the Capitol or in the White House to be available in schools, and other public places. Good enough for our duly elected lawmakers, good enough for all of us.
If only we had this common sense after we evaluated the risk of hijackers flying planes into buildings. Those are even rarer. And look how much we are spending to guard against it today.
The risk of your kid or other person being a victim of a mass shooting is in the noise compared to so many other forms of death and injury: Drunk drivers, cigarettes, etc. I'm more nervous about my kids riding in a neighbor's small car than I am about a gun man opening fire at the school. It would probably be overreacting to change the priorities of law enforcement and the legal system due to one crazy event every couple of years: The same guy who wants to take away all the guns may be the same guy who jogs in the street with (not against) traffic (when there's a perfectly good sidewalk available) or drives after five drinks or lets his kid ride a bike with no helmet.
I suggest that you click on the link before you ask that question. Alberto's argument may be "absurd", but his facts are perhaps not so.
What do you think of this? http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/the-massacre-in-connecticut/266300/ The author had written another piece just a while back: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-case-for-more-guns-and-more-gun-control/309161/
"No motive was given for the attack, which resembled a string of similar assaults against Chinese schoolchildren in 2010 that killed nearly 20 and wounded more than 50." Then we can bicker that 20 is not 25-30. The point being whether or not a knife can kill 25-30 is not a point of absurdity, even if comparing a mildly lethal weapon to a massively lethal AK47 is. "You are also quoting one knife attack versus how many gun attacks in this country recently? Really?" No, I am citing the fact that gun attacks that cause 25-30 fatalities in this country are very rare, and that while comparing a knife to a gun is absurd, so too is the fact that this instance of 25-30 killed by a gun is rare. Don't believe me, check how many such gun attacks we have had this century. Here, http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/ Check when the last time was when 25-30 were killed by a gun shooting. And no, I am not arguing that gun shootings are to be ignored.
(sigh!)
Otherwise, you might as well add up deaths per year from all gun shootings and you will get far more than 25
Yes I understand that you find it horrific, but that does not take the place of an argument. It is horrific to some, for example, that people smoke pot, but that is NOT an argument to ban it (corrected)
Let's say that we have armed security guards (like at banks) to guard schools. We do have crossing guards to help kids cross roads, so surely this is not something one could reasonably object to. Armed guards at banks deter robberies, armed guards at schools would provide some measure of safety. Now, if we can entertain that, can we entertain, instead of guards, some teachers who are licensed/certified and trained in gun defense for this? We allow such training for CPR, and we do have a school nurse to administer medical aid. This would be security aid. Yes, in case of an explosive situation like this Conn. school, it may be that some teachers will duck for cover and hide. But one thing you can be sure of is that if they are not armed, they are useless whether they stand up or hide. So, what would be the argument against that? What I am trying to get at is that we are not in 1791 trying to write the Constitution. We have to work with what we have today. Closing loopholes is good (but Colorado closed its gun show loophole, and Aurora still happened), but not enough. Why? There are 300 million guns out there, and until one figures out how to democratically rid ourselves of them, you are leaving a major portion of the issue unaddressed.
Check when the last time was when 25-30 were killed by a gun shooting." I am not sure what your query was then? I added up the events in the timeline you quoted for each year. Does it have to exceed 25-30 people killed in each incident to be significant or not rare?
There was a gun shooting in a mall ten days or ago. How many were killed in it? 2-3? So, now find a gun shooting where there were 25-30 fatalities. "Does it have to exceed 25-30 people killed in each incident to be significant or not rare?" That depends, you wanted a knifing incident to show you such a massacre. Surely you did not mean the total of knifing homicides in a year. If you did, then it is bad comparison or a poor question, since we know those stats are in a different realm.
The growth is about 4 million guns entering the market. If you prevent guns that can match the firepower those in circulation, you are creating a lopsided imbalance. Then, you end up with situations like this: http://youtu.be/LrlUsaYlKPs It is fair question: If you come across a person trying to shoot you, would you prefer to be unarmed or have a gun? Ideally I would not prefer that a person tried to shoot you, but with 300 million guns out there, those are not low enough odds to bank on the ideal.
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools, should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" "God is not going to go where he is not wanted and so if school administrators really want to protect students, they will start every school day with prayer" I leave it to Google to determine the respective speakers. Somehow talking about a gun tragedy in the context of what we'd like to do or see done is not responsible, unless you bring a celestial dictator into it, and why he did not *and will not* prevent this.
Ignore the undertaker in black standing next to you with a tape measure and keep repeating that "guns don't kill people".
Too many of my facebook "friends" are posting this crap. My simple question is did we also take you G-d out of movie theaters? Malls? Let's get real, we all know what happened. Jesus went over to Moses' place for the Chanukah party, did the old water to wine trick, got blitzed and was sleeping it off when all the children and their teachers were praying to live. [and if you think that was uncaring and sacrilegious, wait until you try to put your myth figures into my public schools.]
None of those things had anything to do with this situation! The 4 guns found were LEGAL and REGISTERED to his mother... This took 1 GUN and 30 BULLETS... No huge cache of ammo etc etc etc etc... Please at least be real about the facts...
We are becoming a nation of selfish degenerates who hate and distrust one another more and more. And strangely, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy - We really can't be trusted.