The Daily - Another Elementary School Massacre

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

This episode covers incidents of mass violence.At least 21 people, including 19 children, were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday morning.It was the deadliest school shooting in the United States since the 2012 attack on the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.For some of the Sandy Hook parents, news of yet another school massacre provoked a chilling sense of numbness.Guest: Elizabeth Williamson, a feature writer for The New York Times and the author of a book on the aftermath of Sandy Hook.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Some Sandy Hook parents whose children were killed in the 2012 attack in Newtown, Conn., shared their emotions and responses to another school shooting.President Biden said that it was “time to turn this pain into action” in remarks following the massacre in Uvalde.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. We come on the air tonight after a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. On Tuesday morning, a gunman opened fire at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. This was supposed to be just two days before school got out. This is supposed to be a joyous time right now. You should be hearing kids laughing. Right now, instead, we're seeing law enforcement swarming over the campus.

Killing at least 21 people, including 19 children. It's been more than 10 hours since this tragedy unfolded and parents tonight are still trying to figure out what is happening with their children. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm looking for my daughter. After the shooting, they don't know where she's at. I mean, the list, her name is not here. I'll look all night if I have to. It was the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 attack on the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

My colleague, Elizabeth Williamson, has spent years talking with the Sandy Hook parents who lost children that day. Today, what their experience tells us about what now awaits the parents in Texas. It's Wednesday, May 25th. Elizabeth, I think within moments of this shooting, so many of our minds immediately went to Sandy Hook. And I thought of you because you spent the past few years

with several Sandy Hook parents who perhaps more than anyone else have some sense of what the parents in Texas are now going through. Yes. Within an hour or less after the news first started to trickle out of Texas that this was an elementary school shooting involving multiple victims who were children. I was corresponding and talking online with the Sandy Hook parents. They had this sense of numbness, a sense of what's wrong with a society in which 10 years later, this very same thing happens again. this very same thing happens again. It's a very specific phenomenon that, you know,

there is a growing fraternity of people in this country who are the parents of children killed at school in mass shootings and relatives of people killed in mass shootings. And, you know, they try to reach forward and help the latest set of survivors and, you know, give them some comfort and tell them what to expect and offer themselves as a resource to people. And Veronique de la Rosa, whose son Noah Posner died at Sandy Hook, he was the youngest victim. She told me that in those hours right after the shooting, when parents gathered in the firehouse near the school and they were waiting for news until they realized that they were the ones whose family members had died. And she told me how she was so drawn to a woman who had appeared there or in the days thereafter who had lost her own son to gun violence.

And she said she just didn't want to this was a kind of, you know, life raft for her, someone who had been through this and who knew the desolation that Veronique was just beginning to experience and understand. What you are describing when you mention the firehouse, I remember this, you're referring to this almost unfathomably tragic scene of the parents at Sandy Hook gathered in one spot and being notified, in some cases, that their children had survived this terrible shooting, and in some cases, learning that their children did not. Yeah. The firehouse was a scene that every parent and every family member described as absolutely gutting. It was

the spot where children and educators who were evacuated gathered to be reunited with their family members. And so consequently, as time went on, this huge firehouse meant to hold eight trucks, this sort of cavernous space was filled with sounds of reunion and relief and joy as people reunited with their family members. And then the group began to dwindle as all those people went away and those who were still missing a family member gathered in the back and wrote the names of their loved one on a piece of notebook paper that was put there for that purpose. And police came, they asked them to describe what had your child been wearing, what had they been carrying, and they were working to identify the victims still in the school. And it fell to the governor of Connecticut to tell them that if you're here and you've put your loved one's name on that list and you haven't been reunited with them, you will not be. And that was a moment of just incredible desolation. People just fell down wailing. And Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emily died at Sandy Hook, was telling me after the shooting in Texas that he has the urge to go and be there with those families because there are always people who will say to them,

you can't imagine what they're going through. But he said, what's really worse is that when you completely understand what they're going through because you've been there, but still there's nothing you can do. That is their loss. You can help them to anticipate what they might feel, but they have still lost someone and in that they are, you know, unreachable.

And alone. And alone. And I wonder, Elizabeth, based on your conversations with these Sandy Hook parents through the years, what is coming for the parents in Texas? What have you come to understand about the very specific grief and experience that comes with losing a child in this very particular, senseless, high-profile way? I think one of the things that every parent and every Sandy Hook relative that I spoke with talks about is a loss of control. That the idea that the world is kind of spinning off its axis is really something that every one of them has described. Lenny Posner, who is Noah Posner's dad,

described it as being a spectator to your own tragedy, that there's media coverage, there's endless discussion. There are the thoughts and prayers that, you know, politicians send out in tweets or statements, and you're feeling like you're kind of watching it all unfold. And then there's just the grim business of planning a funeral and burying your child. And so that is something that permeates everything that comes after, whether it's the charitable response, what people send. What do people send? This is the thing, you know, when we have these mass shootings that affect children, What do people send? that were willing to take concrete policy action. And it's just a sort of outpouring of toys,

of teddy bears, of money. And there was a dispute over where the money was going and whether that money would directly benefit the victim's families, which it has been established it should always do. But not every charity raises money solely for the family's benefit. They do it for their own community programs. And that has created friction and tension and pain. for the victim's families in a place like Sandy Hook,

and presumably now in Texas, to be its own kind of burden, liability, unwanted thing. Yes, and because the families weren't consulted when charities are established or money is raised or decisions are made about how to memorialize, what to do, quite rightly, the families say that they want a voice in all of that. Otherwise, they're having even more control and more agency torn away from them. And that is an additional trauma. They lose control over their loved one's stories, their histories, as they see them played out in the media.

They lose control over how the response to the tragedy will go. And they're very sensitive to that. Mm-hmm. And what else, based on your reporting, is coming for the families in Texas? After every one of these mass shootings, but particularly school shootings involving children and children this age, there is an enormous debate and a heated battle over new gun legislation. And that rages for a while, and then it dies down without any real progress being made on that front. being made on that front. In the case of Sandy Hook, within one hour after the shooting, the NRA had compiled a list of potential legislation that would be proposed in Congress in response to the shooting. Wow. And they were fairly accurate. Limits on large capacity

magazines, background checks, mental health measures. And that was what the families were then faced with. Do we want to go to Washington and lobby for new gun legislation? Do we want to be part of that debate to preserve our sanity and our privacy? Would we rather retreat from that debate? Do we favor the measures that are being proposed or do we oppose them? And there was a sense that by some that the Sandy Hook families were a monolith, that they were lockstep in favor of this measure or that one. When in fact, they had an enormous variety and range of opinions and feelings on this. And for some, it was an absolute priority. And for others, it was something that they didn't want to be involved in at all. And again, speaking to that lack of control and that loss of agency,

what really anchored some of them was the assumption by people involved in this debate or people with a gun legislation bent or an agenda that they could assume their support or their opposition. Their choice, they felt, was taken away from them. And that really angered them and, again, imposed an additional burden on them. So essentially what you're describing is a world in which almost immediately, almost instantaneously, the parents in Sandy Hook became these public symbols. And as a result, they have almost no space to grieve or really make sense of the profound loss they've just experienced. Yes. And then there was an additional trauma, which was kind of related. And that's that for a certain segment of Americans who were very much opposed to new gun legislation,

denial that the shooting even happened became a kind of macabre tool in their toolkit. And back in the time of Sandy Hook in 2012, this was something utterly new that no one really expected. There had been some claims around the Aurora shooting, which was several months before, that this was a so-called false flag planned by the government as a pretext for confiscating Americans' firearms. But this false theory really gained traction around Sandy Hook. And it really made Sandy Hook kind of a foundational story in how misinformation and politically driven false narratives gained traction in our society because now it's not a bug as it was after Sandy Hook. It is really a feature that recurs after almost every high profile mass

shooting. So Elizabeth, are you saying that this is quite likely something that the parents in Texas will inevitably face in the days that follow, the denial that what they experienced actually happened. Yes, because the murder of children in a mass shooting is such a shock to the nation's system and such a potent argument for gun legislation that people who oppose that legislation really find that a significant threat to their position. And so for the segment of far-right people among that group, denying that the shooting ever happened or spreading misinformation around it or accusing the federal government of staging it in service to gun control is a way to fight back against that potential for new legislation. And it's also a way to just muddy the waters around that debate, just to kind of, as Steve Bannon said, flood the zone

with misinformation and lies so that people throw up their hands and say, what actually happened here? Is there any possibility that this could have happened? will buy into that, that the families will endure significant harassment, torment by people who will try to contact them on social media or will figure out where they live or how to reach them on the phone and deny that they lost anyone and accuse them worse. And this is a phenomenon that began with Sandy Hook. They are singled out by name as actors in a plot to impose gun control on Americans who don't want it. And so they'll be targeted. That, history tells us, is a fairly accurate prediction. I'd be pretty surprised if that didn't happen to these parents in Texas. We'll be right back. I have to imagine, Elizabeth, that there were parents in Newtown who said, after everything you have just described, the charity efforts, the lobbying efforts, the efforts at harassment, that they just needed to tune everything out, go into their house, close the door, and sit with their grief.

close the door, and sit with their grief. Absolutely. And I would say that described most of the parents, particularly when it did come to the misinformation campaigns and the conspiracy theories and the denials. I'm thinking about Robbie Parker, who mentioned how in the beginning, he just felt like, I am not going to engage with these bullies.

I have two surviving children who are toddlers. I need to care for my family. I don't want to fight back. And even though he was absolutely targeted by name because he was the first parent to speak publicly after the shooting, He was really pursued, including in the real world, by conspiracy theorists who confronted him years later. He was determined not to engage and to try and stay on the sidelines and protect his family. But after 2018, when the Parkland shooting happened, he and his wife, Alyssa, were asked to meet and talk with a family who had lost their daughter at Parkland.

And the father described an analogous situation to what Robbie had gone through. People confronting him, pointing to his public remarks and saying that they were evidence that he was lying and that he was an actor in a plot. And Robbie realized this is not going away. This is six years after Sandy Hook. And it was then that he realized that he needed to join this fight against the conspiracy theorists and against the misinformation circulating around these mass shootings. Mm-hmm. And Elizabeth, have these parents, have they seen any change that might represent something positive coming out of such a horrific tragedy? Yes, they absolutely have, Michael. So in mid-2018, the families filed four separate defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones,

the InfoWars broadcaster who was the super spreader of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, and an adamant pro-Second Amendment broadcaster. And late last year, he was found liable by default in all four. So that was a sweeping victory for the families. And this year, juries will decide how much Jones must pay the families in damages. So while the courts are an imperfect solution to this problem of misinformation, it's a significant deterrent to people who don't want to be sued. It's been shown to be effective in getting people to stop talking about Sandy Hook as a hoax or a conspiracy. Jones himself hasn't mentioned it on his show in years. So it is seen as a significant victory. And that effort was led by Lenny Posner, who is

the father of Noah, the youngest Sandy Hook victim who has made it his life's work since the shooting to push for an end to misinformation around all these events. And on the gun front this year, they achieved a pretty significant victory in that they won a $73 million settlement from insurers for Remington, which was the maker of the rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting. And this was seen as a significant breakthrough because there's a 2005 law that shields gun manufacturers from legal liability if their weapons are used in mass shootings. And this is seen as a significant effort to pierce that legal immunity and it has inspired a lot of other lawsuits that are similar. So these families have made real progress

in their efforts, I'm thinking back to the phrase you used earlier Elizabeth, to get a little bit of control over the situation. Yes. They've been able to use their power as the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook to push for the change that our system and our society will allow. Mm-hmm. They would like to see more, but they have done very well

with the hand they've been dealt. Elizabeth, it's now been 10 years since Sandy Hook, and given everything you told us about what lies ahead in a tragedy like this, have those parents ever really been able to grieve the essential loss that they suffered, the loss of these little children? I think that that is really a question for them. That's sort of the realm that you and I and most Americans can never really enter. You know, it's a very specific thing.

But from what the families have told me, this is not a start point, end point situation. They always grieve. This never leaves. It's just good days and bad days, days where you feel like you have a little more space to do something other than grief. And days where there's no space at all. And days where, yes, there's no room at all for anything but grieving. Elizabeth, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Thank you.

On Tuesday night, hours after the shooting, a dwindling number of families still remained inside a civic center in Uvalde, where parents have been receiving DNA swabs and waiting for news of their children. Good evening, fellow Americans. I had hoped when I became president I would not have to do this again. Another massacre. In Washington, President Biden spoke to the nation about the massacre

and about the grief of the parents whose children had been murdered. To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There's a hollowness in your chest. You feel like you're being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out. Suffocating. It's never quite the same. Biden expressed outrage that so little has changed

in the 10 years since the shooting at Sandy Hook. Since then, there have been over 900 incidents of gunfires reported on school grounds. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Santa Fe High School in Texas. Oxford High School in Michigan. The list goes on and on, and the list grows. Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Tuesday night, details about the suspected Texas shooter began to emerge. Uvalde is a rural community of about 15,000 where the suspect was known to many residents. Friends described him to journalists as an increasingly troubled 18-year-old who had been bullied over a speech impediment and had a difficult relationship with his mother. and had a difficult relationship with his mother. Shortly before the massacre, he's believed to have shot and critically injured his grandmother, crashed a pickup truck into a barrier near the elementary school,

then went inside and began shooting. And in the latest Republican primaries, both the governor and secretary of state in Georgia won their party's nomination, beating out Republican rivals backed by Donald Trump, who denied setback of the 2022 primaries, and a sign that his hold over the Republican Party may be slipping. Both the governor, Brian Kemp, and the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, won by a wide margin. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Rob Zipko, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Chelsea Daniel. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Lisa Tobin, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.