After six years, a new call to action

Six years later, nothing has gotten easier. Nothing is any less senseless. As another anniversary of the killings of 20 students and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown arrives, it remains a tragedy of unfathomable proportions. This year, the annual remembrance was closely tied to the release of a batch of documents relating to and written by the killer himself. These are documents that were kept under wraps by state officials in the intervening years but were finally unveiled after a long, hard-fought battle by state journalists to convince those in power that the documents, painful as they are to contemplate, are in fact in the public interest and must be released.

And so they have been.

It takes nothing away from the necessary struggle of those journalists to say that the documents don’t, in the end, add much to our understanding of what happened in Sandy Hook. The slaughter that day was the work of a deeply troubled individual, one who was unreachable by anyone in a position to offer help but, more than that, out of reach altogether as he moved out of regular contact with anyone other than his mother.

His mother, of course, was his first victim that day. The question we struggle with remains how to prevent a recurrence. As a panoply of mass shootings in schools and other public setting in the intervening years attests, there is no simple answer, much as we might hope to find one.

For many, the focus was and continues to be on mental health. There’s no question that better mental health care is an urgent need in this country, and better funding and other resources must be dedicated to ensuring people treat these issues as seriously as they do physical health, which tends to be much easier to diagnose and easier for others to understand.

But in facing this particular challenge, it isn’t enough. There are people who are unwilling or unable to seek the mental health care they need. There are people who are isolated or incapacitated to the point that help is out of reach. And no one, to our knowledge, has detailed how improved mental health care could have prevented the catastrophe at Sandy Hook.

The question then becomes limiting the harm from people intent on wreaking havoc, and that is where the issue of guns is unavoidable. We supported and continue to support efforts to limit the availability of weapons and accessories that can kill many people in a short time span. Such weapons serve to turn a tragic situation into one that is, to this day, unthinkable.

Connecticut has taken strong steps in limiting the availability of such weapons, but the fact that there has been no repeat of Sandy Hook here in the years since is only tangentially related to that fact. Guns, after all, easily cross state lines.

The effort must be national, and it cannot wait any longer.

The question we struggle with remains how to prevent a recurrence. As a panoply of mass shootings in schools and other public setting in the intervening years attests, there is no simple answer, much as we might hope to find one.