Source: ET
About a week ago, a 20-year-old by the name of Adam Lanza walked into a school in Newtown, Connecticut — a small town a few hours northeast of New York City. In the next 30 minutes, Lanza shot and killed 27 people before finally killing himself. Of those 27 casualties, 20 were children aged between five and 10.
The massacre at Newtown set off a firestorm in the US, with most of the anguish and the anger aimed at America’s notoriously lax gun laws. President Barack Obama announced at the funeral of the victims that he would be pushing for legislative changes to prevent future massacres. And The New Yorker spoke for many when it asked, “What does it take for a society to be sickened by its own behaviour and to change its attitudes?”
By the end of the week, The New Yorker had its answer: the vice-president of the National Rifle Association responded defiantly that the answer to massacres like Newtown was to have more guns not less, because “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” And pundits had already started scaling back their earlier optimistic predictions that American society would now support limits on guns.