Vigil honors Sandy Hook Elementary School students

On Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old man murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Twenty of his victims were six and seven-year-old children. Six were teachers and staff members at the small school.
It was the deadliest mass shooting at a school in U.S. history and the fourth deadliest in the nation.
Around the country, indeed, around the world, the sorrow seemed unending. Calls for gun reform – a ban on assault weapons, universal background checks – echoed in the halls of Congress.
But, in the intervening decade little has changed, said those at a vigil Tuesday night at Salem United Church of Christ in Doylestown. While the dozens who sat in the pews of the beautifully decorated church solemnly remembered those slaughtered at Sandy Hook, and all the thousands of other gun violence victims, they were also challenged to help end the carnage.
“Those six-year-olds murdered at Sandy Hook should be graduating with me in a year and a half, said Heera Kalidindi, a Central Bucks student.
“When the survivors returned to school, they were asked to choose a “safe word” they could use whenever they needed to, as they thought of a dead classmate or walked over where their body had been. They chose ‘monkey’; it was repeated over and over and over, as teachers cared for them,” Kalindini said.
“Those with power to make change, don’t. The silence is deafening,” she said.
Another student, Iman Azeez, who attends Council Rock South High School, described the drills she and her classmates undergo in the event a shooter enters the building. “We have to move shelves in front of the doors…we have to take off our belts and use them as straps” to close off possible entrances. “We have to breathe as quietly as we can.”
She asked, “How many more futures will be taken away?” And, Azeez added, the killers “are among us; they are not strangers...we have to understand the root causes.”

As photos of the Sandy Hook victims scrolled across a screen and each person’s name was read, the church fell silent, while small candles were lit. A prayer and response was read.
State Sen. Steve Santarsiero (D-10) spoke emotionally of the day 10 years ago when he learned of the incomprehensible mass shooting. “The news was inescapable. I thought people would rise up and do something about gun violence, but 10 years later we are no closer to changing things.
“Every pew here should be filled, we have to be angry,” he said.
Recalling when Nicole Hockley, the mother of Dylan, who was murdered at Sandy Hook, testified in Harrisburg after the tragedy, Santarsiero said, “There wasn’t a dry eye, not a Republican, not a Democrat.”
And still, he said, “It didn’t change anything in Harrisburg.”
The senator spoke about a Uvalde, Texas, mother whose baby was six months old when Sandy Hook happened. That child was killed in May when an 18-year-old entered Robb Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers over the course of an hour. It was the 27th school shooting in the U.S. in 2022 and the deadliest since Sandy Hook.
“Still our country, our state refuses to act,” said Santarsiero. “It’s unacceptable. Unfettered access to guns was never intended by the Second Amendment. We must stop this epidemic of violence. Half measures will no longer suffice. We must ban assault weapons.”
A list of those killed by guns in Bucks County was also read.
CeaseFirePA, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence in Pennsylvania, organized the vigil.
To learn more about how to prevent gun violence, visit CeaseFirePA.org.

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