School shooting survivors arrive in Newtown


[font size = 0]Justin Jourdain, a 2008 graduate of Red Lake High School who was in the school during the shootings that occurred in 2005, poses with a Red Lake Band of Chippewa flag signed by students and residents of the reservation in Bemidji, Minn. Jourdain and others are taking two signed flags on a trip to Newtown, Conn., to offer comfort to the grieving community in the wake of the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. - Photo: AP / SL[/font size]

When members of Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation received a plaque from Columbine High School massacre survivors, they hoped the gift would stay with them.

The Columbine survivors presented it to them in 2005, after people at Red Lake – including five students – were gunned down in what was then the second most-deadly school shooting.

We hope you never pass this on, the Columbine survivors told them, but if a tragedy like this happens again, go help heal the community where it does.

Late Thursday morning, four survivors from the Red Lake massacre arrived in Newtown with that plaque, which they planned to give students at the town's middle school Thursday night. The survivors were among 13 Red Lake students and even more administrators who traveled to help those affected by the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting spree that left 20 children dead.

"They've just traveled almost 30 hours driving cross-country in the middle of all this weather to get out here and to be with the families," coordinator Stephanie Hope Smith said in front of Newtown's Edmond Town Hall.

If massacre of 20 children in Newtown doesn't bring gun control, what will?



Disbelief, horror, revolt: This is what we all felt when the news arrived. By its magnitude and cruelty, it surpassed everything else. We were not ready for it. Earlier tragedies should have immunized us. But they didn’t. Not to this violence, to this bloodshed.

A young man assassinates his mother with her own weapons. Then, he goes to an elementary school and murders 20 children, one after the other, firing more and more bullets into their small bodies.

Why?

The need, the desire to understand is as strong as the pain itself.

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Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz honored Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victim Jack Pinto during New York’s game against the Atlanta Falcons yesterday. On one of Cruz’s cleats the football player wrote “Jack Pinto, My Hero,” on the other, Cruz wrote ”R.I.P Jack Pinto.” Cruz also had a small honor for the six year old on one of his gloves. He wrote inscribed, “Jack Pinto This one is 4 U.!”

“There are no words that can describe the type of feeling you get when a kid idolizes you so much that they want to, unfortunately, put him in a casket with your jersey on,” Cruz told a reporter with the New York Daily News. “I can’t even explain it.”

Nancy Lanza feared son, Adam, was ‘getting worse’; told friend ‘he was burning himself with a lighter’



Less than a week before her son would launch his horrifying attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun-loving mom Nancy Lanza knew “she was losing him” and that “he was getting worse.”

A drinking buddy of Lanza’s told the Daily News that her son Adam had long been troubled and rarely came up in conversation.

“She just looked down at the glass and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m worried I’m losing him,’” said the bar pal, who asked not to be named, of the ominous conversation at the watering hole My Place in Newtown, Conn.

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“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nancy-lanza-feared-son-adam-worse-article-1.1221505#ixzz2FHiYsEn4

Pakistani children light candles to pay tribute to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims in southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Dec. 15, 2012. Pakistan has sent condolences to the United States over the shooting incident, local media reported Saturday.