December 14, 2012: The Sandy Hook Massacre

December 14, 2012, 10 years ago: A mentally ill 20-year-old man named Adam Lanza shoots and kills his mother in Newtown, Connecticut. He then goes to Sandy Hook Elementary School, and shoots 20 children and 6 adult staff members. As the police close in, he kills himself.

Newtown, then as now a town of about 27,000 people, was home to rubber innovator Charles Goodyear, film director Elia Kazan, civil rights lawyer Burke Marshall, decathlete-turned-businessman-turned-businesswoman Bruce-turned-Caitlin Jenner, Blossom actress Jenna von Oÿ, and Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games books. The school is about 76 miles northeast of Times Square. Violent crime was rare there: In the 10 years before the Sandy Hook Massacre, there had been only 1 homicide in the town.

At the time, I had a job connected to social media, and it forced me to watch television, going back and forth between the news channels. It was a Friday, when I was allowed to go home at 3:00. This time, I couldn't. I just couldn't. I just sat there, watching the coverage, until I realized how dark it was, and how I hated getting home on the bus, and left at around 7:00.

It sounds like the story you hear about people, now old, glued to their TV sets after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. I had already joined the entire country in doing so after the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 (not after the explosion of Columbia in 2003, though); during the O.J. Simpson bronco chase in 1994; after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; and after the hit on Osama bin Laden the year before.

Lanza's main weapon was a Bushmaster XM-15, a model of AR-15 automatic rifle. This was hardly the only recent mass shooting in which it had been used, so now, calls came for its banning, including from the President of the United States, Barack Obama. But the Republican Party controlled Congress, and absolutely no action was taken.

And so, the war on guns was over, and the guns won. The American people had just re-elected Obama the month before, but had re-elected the Republican Congress as well. It was a message: "This is America. Here, we love our guns more than we love our children."

What's more, conspiracy theories blew up, some suggesting that the massacre never happened. And National Rifle Association spokesman Wayne LaPierre suggesting we should have more guns, not fewer. Leading to a rare agreement in front page headlines of the Daily News and the New York Post.

There had been genuine wackos in American politics before, during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the John Birch Society in the 1960s, to the conspiracy flakes gunning for President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to the Tea Party fanatics that had already been established in 2009, Obama's 1st year in office. But this now seems, in hindsight, like the launch of the QAnon Era, where such dishonesty, stupidity and ignorance began to be shamelessly brought into the mainstream.

And the mass shootings have never stopped, including in schools. Donald Trump did nothing about it while he occupied the White House. Joe Biden has tried, and did get Congress to pass a minor improvement on background checks.

There appears to be no connection between the school being named "Sandy Hook" and an outcropping of land on the Atlantic Coast of Monmouth County, New Jersey having the same name.

Those children would now be juniors in high school.

Guns: Don't Blame the Video Games

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Massacre, once again, people who want to blame anything else but the easy access to guns have brought up an old straw man: Video games. They claim that there are video games -- including the popular Grand Theft Auto series, one of whose covers is shown above -- whose violence leads children to become violent, and act out their fantasies in real life.

Do you think video games have too much influence on kids? Let me use my own experience, from the 1978 debut of Space Invaders until my 1987 graduation from high school, as an example.

I played Pong, a game similar to tennis, but I've never qualified for Wimbledon.

I played Space Invaders, Missile Command, Galaxian and its sequel Galaga, but NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) hasn't hired me. (I know, the initials don't really reflect the acronym.)

I played Centipede, but I've never been hired by an exterminator. Nor have I ever wanted such a job.

I played Joust, but I've never been hired to work at Medieval Times, or any Renaissance Faire.

I played Techmo Bowl (and, in the 1990s, the even more fun Cyberball 2072), but the New York Jets have never put me on their coaching staff. And when you think of who they have hired...

I played video games based on Star Trek and Star Wars, but neither Rick Berman nor George Lucas has ever hired me as a consultant on their respective franchises.

I played Castle Wolfenstein, but the History Channel hasn't asked me to participate in any of its World War II documentaries. (I'm not saying I'm blaming aliens, but... )

I played Crush, Crumble & Chomp! and Rampage, but no one's ever hired me to work on a monster movie.

I was a whiz at Spy Hunter, but the CIA hasn't shown the slightest interest in me. (Which may be a good thing.)

And, let's not forget, a lot of those games involve shooting at living things, and otherwise causing destruction. I once wrecked a car, but it certainly wasn't intentional.

Blaming violent video games for real-world violence is ridiculous. And it needs to stop. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is stopping him from getting the gun.