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Editorials
Reasonable adults must act after tragedy : Editorials : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, Illinois Reasonable adults must act after tragedy
| 12/20/2012
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Innocent children and their teachers died. And adding to the tragedy was the fact that it came so close to Christmas.
On Dec. 1, 1958, 92 students and three nuns at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago died when fire swept through the school.
On Dec. 14, 2012, 20 students and six of their teachers and school staff members were killed when a man opened fire in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., after shooting his way through the building's front door.
In the immediate aftermath of the Our Lady of the Angels fire, there was considerable finger pointing, with blame and accusations thrown at the Chicago Archdiocese, the parish priest, the school janitor and the nun who had her students kneel to say the Rosary as smoke curled in under her classroom door.
But, once the immediate shock had passed, it became clear that the small fire that started in a basement spread quickly, trapping students, because no building code required the old school building to have sprinklers, fire escapes or even stairway fire doors. The building code was quickly changed and all schools in the city-regardless of age-got those fire safety features and instituted fire safety instruction and fire drills.
In the immediate aftermath of the horrible shooting Friday, we've already heard the blame and accusations. If only all assault weapons were banned. If only all school staff members were armed.
Unfortunately, preventing future incidents like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School will take more than life safety construction projects.
We need to look at the issue of guns-what's out there, who can get them and how? But we also need to address the issue of mental health. How can we identify people who may cause these massacres? How can we stop them? How can we keep them from guns, or bombs or other weapons? How can we prevent them from reaching the point where gunning down six year olds seems like a good idea? What makes people that way? Can they be helped?
We need to look at who is perpetuating the notion-apparently held by the shooter's mother-that things are so wrong in our society, so near breakdown, that we need to stock up on assault weapons.
In the aftermath of Friday's shooting, we need to reassure children that, while bad things can happen, most adults would never harm them and would in fact do anything in their power to prevent them from being harmed. We need to reassure children that reasonable adults want to try to stop these horrors from ever happening again.
And then we need to be reasonable adults and actually do that.
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