This book covers the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. This event took place on December 14, 2012. Adam Lanza murdered his mother before driving to his former elementary school, where he subsequently murdered twenty children and six faculty members. Lanza suffered from anxiety, depression, anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and Aspberger's Syndrome. It is also reported that he was very preoccupied with violent thoughts. While it is virtually impossible to say that one or all of those things was the catalyst for his eventual murder spree, it is hard to imagine that they did not play a strong role. After killing the children and faculty members, he shot himself, ending the violence. It is hard to think about how all of the children felt while this was going on, and even in the years after for those who survived or were in other parts of the school. The collective trauma of this town is unfathomable.

I have been waiting for this book to release on Audible, so I picked it up with my March credits. I read another book about this event, (Newtown- Matthew Lysiak), so I knew quite a bit of this information. I found the book to be well researched and well written. It delivered the facts of the event, with personal accounts from family members of the victims. It also gave some details about the shooter and his family. One thing I took away from this was a renewed sense that people condemn entire family trees down to the roots at the beginning of time for the actions of one family member. The brother of the shooter really had a lot of negativity directed at him, probably because people love to place the blame. Blame should lie on the shoulders of the shooter, and the parents, especially the mother, for failing to give him the intervention that was suggested by medical professionals. I think that this book is worth reading, and an important wake up call about the damage that rabid conspiracies and people's actions on the internet.

Another thing I took away from this book is that people just really suck. There was absolutely no reason to attack the families of the victims, the surviving children, the friends and coworkers of those killed. While I personally believe in the right to own weapons, I also believe in responsible ownership. I believe in background checks, certain limitations on what you can buy, registration, and courses before you are allowed to purchase and get permits. I believe that banning weapons will not keep people from getting a weapon, and I also believe that if someone is determined to get wild and kill a bunch of people, they will find a way to do it. Creating a conspiracy theory and rabidly running with it to suit whatever "agenda" people want to believe is being perpetrated against them is just this side of insanity, and most assuredly mob mentality. I listen to a podcast about conspiracy theories, simply to educate myself on some of the outlandish things that people buy into. These people lost their children, and to be subjected to a bunch of cretins online demanding that they prove their slaughtered child was an actual person and was actually dead is too far and sick. At one point, they were demanding the children be dug up so they could see if there were actually bodies in the caskets. It was truly repulsive.