Sandy Hook and the Promises We Never Kept.

I wrote this 12 years ago, the day after we learned 20 innocent children were slaughtered in a matter of minutes by a lone 20-year-old with a machine gun.

I called it, “I Don’t Need to Know Their Names”. I might write it differently today. I don’t know. I think I come across in this piece as someone still in shock, not knowing how to feel, never having dealt with anything quite so horrific and obscene, so crushing, so terrible, so sad. I haven’t changed a word. This is how it was for me.

I wish I could say we learned from that tragedy, that the slaughter of 20 children and six of their caretakers was enough to stop the madness perpetrated by gun manufacturers, gun sellers, and Second Amendment misusers who still demand freedom to own high-capacity military-style weaponry in a country that used to be civilized enough to put limits on who could own those killing machines.

Instead, on the day after those children were murdered, on the day I wrote this, reports of over-the-top gun sales were already coming in.

Now, 12 years later, nothing has changed, and it appears that nothing will. The incoming Trump regime will see to it that it only gets worse.

Still, we’ll remember this, and we’ll go on trying. Those children whose names are now indelible in our memories, along with every other child lost to us because of gun violence, deserve our efforts.

I Don’t Need to Know Their Names

(First published at Ramona’s Voices, 12/15/2012)

Maria Shriver posted this two years ago. I’m posting it again.

It's Saturday, the day after what will forever be known as the Sandy Hook School murders. Yesterday, Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old man, broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and shot to death six adults and 20 small children.

We're all in shock and looking for answers. We're crying, grieving, mourning, and we want answers. We want gun control that actually controls guns. We want people not to blame the guns but the shooter. We want to know the names of the victims, and, as I write this, all news stations are on alert, awaiting a press conference where those names will finally be announced.

We decided long ago that when we know the names of the dead, we make a connection; we see them as human beings and not as statistics. When George W. Bush, in an atmosphere where so many people were against his wars, decided that it was too political to show our war dead arriving home in body bags, we were furious.

When President Obama finally opened it up, publicizing the names and showing us proof that the flag-draped coffins were back on our soil, we saw it as our chance to honor the dead in a way that actually meant something.

I want to know the names of our military dead. There is something to be said for giving them public identities in order to recognize that they gave their lives in the service of our country. They gave their lives for us.

But when I heard this morning that they were going to release the names of the children later today, I cried. I don't want to know their names today. I don't need to know their names today. I don't want their names associated with yesterday's horror. Not now.

The emotions are still so raw it could be my own shock, my own grief, my own thoughts as a parent and about kids in general, but if the lives of those kids can't be given back to the families, the least we can do as supporters, it seems to me, is to take a moment to remember them, not as victims of a gruesome murder but as wonderful, vivacious, funny, wacky little creatures who gave those around them, every day, a reason to love them.

I don't need to know their names in order to honor their existence and to mourn with the mourners. I can picture them as children in every school, in every community, in every home. I see them in the eyes of every child who trots off to school thinking the worst that could happen to them is to fail a test or make their best friend mad at them. I know who they are.

I don't want this first day without them to be laden with gun control arguments or off-the-wall, fact-free analyses about what happened and why, only later to be capped with funeral dirge music as the names of the children are read off, as their sweet pictures roll on and off the screen, raw reminders that their deaths were the outcome of an unspeakable act of madness. Not today.

Please. Not today.

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