Newtown Sandy Hook Shooting: 3rd grader describes shooting from classroom

"I heard something like someone was kicking on a door," a little boy, a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, near Newtown, Connecticut, told a reporter for NBC. He said that bullets were "whizzing by" him in the hallway, but "a teacher pulled me into her room" before one hit him. "The gym teachers told us to go in the corner and we huddled," another said. "We were in the gym and I heard really loud bangs,' a third boy, a nine-year-old, told the Times. "And we heard yelling, and we heard gunshots. We heard lots of gunshots.... We had to go into the closet in the gym. Then someone came and told us to run down the hallway." The children ran, some with their eyes closed, and made it out. By then, twenty of the children who had arrived at school that morning were dead, along with six grownups—that is a preliminary count—and the shooter, a twenty-year-old man named Adam Lanza, whose parents were among the adult victims. (Earlier reports had named his older brother, Ryan.) "The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old," President Obama said in a press conference. And then he began to cry. This is one of the worst school shootings in the history of a country that has had plenty of them. The images from Newtown are hard to shake: the children comforting each other, the parents for whom comfort now must feel useless; the seventeen-year-old who lived near enough to hear the shots and came running, looking for his nine-year-old sister. A teacher leading a line of students, many of them crying but each, with the orderliness of the very young, with hands on the shoulder of the child ahead. Other children had been told to find a buddy before making a break for it, and did. They were brave. The contrast here is not only between the civility of the children and the cruelty of the shooter, but between what was asked of them at this moment and how little the public and elected officials ask of themselves when it comes to doing something about gun violence. (One of the first questions was not just what kind of gun Lanza had but how many.) How do we find ourselves asking kindergarteners to be more courageous in the face of a gunman than politicians are in the face of the gun lobby? Here is the difference guns make: A man comes to kill his mother. He has already shot his father. He goes to the school where she works and, on his way down the hall, turns his weapon on some of her colleagues. He finds her in a room filled with kindergarteners; she is their teacher, they are all about five years old. After he has shot her, he turns around and keeps pulling the trigger until the children are dead, too. Then he shoots himself. In what sort of state of rage and nothingness do you have to be to take even one of those steps? Adam Lanza moved from one to another for reasons we will be sorting out for a long time, maybe forever. His mother is dead, and by the time the shooting stopped, so was he. Th