AI
Thursday, December 20, 2012 8:16:00 AM
Top Conservative Publication: Shooting Occurred Because Women Ran The School
Victoria Soto, 27-year-old teacher killed while protecting her students.
By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm
If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.
National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/17/1347291/top-conservative-magazine-newtown-massacre-is-the-price-we-pay-for-the-second-amendment/ ], published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist [ http://feministing.com/2008/03/02/the_washington_post_bitches_ai/ ] Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335996/newtown-answers-nro-symposium ]”:
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
Via Jessica Valenti [ http://jessicavalenti.tumblr.com/post/38310906793/national-review-newtown-could-have-been-avoided-if-a ], who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.”
Allen went on to blame Lanza’s mother, saying “You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons…Unfortunately, the idea of being an ‘adult’ and a ‘man’ once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/19/1361521/top-conservative-publication-newtown-happened-because-women-ran-the-school/ [with comments]
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'Light amidst the darkness': Heroic teacher Victoria Soto remembered
Victoria Soto, 27, first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook elementary. Soto had taught for five years and was known by students as silly and loving.
Obtained by NBC News
By Tracy Connor, Sandra Lilley and Tom Winter, NBC News
December 19, 2012
One of Newtown’s heroic teachers – remembered as a bright light on the darkest of days – was laid to rest Wednesday, with family friend Paul Simon performing the folk song “Sound of Silence [ http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2012/12/19/16021164-paul-simon-performs-sound-of-silence-at-funeral-for-sandy-hook-teacher ].”
Mourners who arrived at a church in Stratford, Conn., for Victoria Soto’s funeral were handed ribbons of green, her favorite color.
They spoke of the 27-year-old’s selfless final act: She died trying to protect her first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School from rifle fire during the massacre, according to her family.
“Truthfully, you have been a hero to me for a lot longer than five days,” said her sister, Jillian Soto, according to the Stamford Advocate [ http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Funerals-wakes-for-6-more-victims-4130907.php ]. "You've been my big sister. The one I always looked up to."
Another sister, Carlee, sobbed as she spoke. "The pain is unbelievable," she said.
Outside, family friend Ryan Ortiz, 27, said he couldn’t help thinking if he would have been as courageous as Soto.
“Mind-boggling what she had to go through,” Ortiz said. “No matter how many times I sit at home and think of what I would have done, you just can't imagine being in that situation.
“In my opinion, she was that light amidst the darkness that was going on that day in that school,” Ortiz said. “There's really no other way to remember her than being that light in that room."
Simon was asked by the Soto family to perform at the service; his sister-in-law, a nurse, is close to Soto’s mother, also a nurse. He came and left without comment.
Soto, who was in her fifth year of teaching, was finishing up her daily morning meeting with the students of Classroom 10 when gunman Adam Lanza began his rampage Friday morning.
Relatives say they were told she hurried the kids she called her "angels" into a closet behind her and tried to shield them from the bullets.
Some of the children in her class managed to survive the slaughter. Many did not.
Funerals were held Wednesday for first-graders Charlotte Bacon, Caroline Previdi and Daniel Barden, and a wake was held for 7-year-old Chase Kowalski – continuing a week of mourning.
A large contingent of firefighters arrived for 7-year-old Daniel’s funeral at St. Rome of Lima church in Newtown, where the strains of bagpipes filled the air.
Two of his relatives are members of the New York City Fire Department, and he dreamed of wearing a uniform when he grew up, according to a Facebook post from a firefighters’ foundation.
"It was one of the hardest funerals I was ever at,” FDNY Lt. Eric Torres told NBCNewYork.com [ http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Newtown-Sandy-Hook-Elementary-School-Shooting-Grief-Mourning-Children-Funeral-184075371.html ].
Family friend Laura Stamberg, of New Paltz, N.Y., said that on the day of the shooting, Daniel’s father Mark spent precious moments with him, teaching him a Christmas song on the piano.
"They played foosball and then he taught him the song and then he walked him to the bus and that was their last morning together," Stamberg told the Associated Press.
At a funeral where mourners wore buttons with her picture, 6-year-old redhead Charlotte was recalled as a ball of energy who loved the color pink and wanted to be a veterinarian. Caroline was “just a doll,” was just a doll," family friend Pam Fehrs said. "She was happy – dancing and happy everywhere she went."
Later on Wednesday, hundreds attended a wake in Woodbury, Conn., for Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Hochsprung, 47, who also has been hailed as a hero for running toward the sound of gunfire after Lanza blasted his way into the school.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman came to pay their respects at Munson Lovetere Funeral Home, where candles in paper bags, arranged to spell HOPE, were laid out on the front lawn.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan also attended. Earlier in the day, he said Hochsprung and five other staffers killed at Sandy Hook “made the ultimate sacrifice, literally laying down their lives to protect the children they taught and cared for.”
“If it was not for the quick and courageous response of other teachers and staff, even more children and adults might have died,” he said.
Some of the services have been marked not just by tears, but by calls for tougher gun laws. Miguel Padilla, who works with Soto’s father, said he hoped the unity shown in the wake of the tragedy would translate into legislative action.
“With assault rifles, there is no need for those,” he said outside the church. “If you need to protect yourself, a handgun is good enough. That a 20-year old can get his hands on [an assault rifle] is pathetic.
“Something big has to come out of this,” he added. “They have to change the law.”
NBC News' Courtney Hazlett contributed to this report.
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Related
NBCLatino: Soto remembered as a hero and a giving soul
http://nbclatino.com/2012/12/19/victoria-soto-remembered-as-a-hero-and-giving-soul/
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© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/19/16001132-light-amidst-the-darkness-heroic-teacher-victoria-soto-remembered [with comments]
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Victoria Soto Sacrificed Herself To Protect Her Students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SvkDNmOqKQ
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Newt Gingrich Blames ‘Anti-Religious’ Secular Government For Newtown Shooting
Former presidential candidate and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
By Adam Peck on Dec 19, 2012 at 9:45 am
During a local talk radio show early Wednesday morning, former Speaker Newt Gingrich
[(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73012285 ] cast his lot with the religious right by blaming last week’s tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on secularism and immoral video games.
Gingrich joined host Brian Thomas of 55KRC in Cincinnati [ http://www.55krc.com/pages/onair_BrianThomas.html ] to discuss his latest book, but the conversation quickly pivoted towards gun control and why godlessness in our schools is really to blame:
When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.
Listen to the remarks:
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/#thinkpro/gingrich-on-guns ) embedded]
Gingrich is perhaps the most prominent Republican yet to blame godlessness for the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/14/1339971/huckabee-says-connecticut-school-massacre-occurred-because-we-removed-god-from-our-schools/ ] on the day of the shooting that the tragedy occurred because we “removed God from our schools,” while televangelist James Dobson blamed [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/17/1347161/james-dobson-blames-marriage-equality-and-abortion-for-newtown-shooting/ ] gay marriage and abortion.
This is also not the first time Gingrich has sought to blame secularism and video game manufacturers for causing a school shooting. After the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, he appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos and made a very similar argument [ http://www.gameology.org/node/1484 ]:
I think the fact is if you look at the amount of violence in games that young people play, at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the de-humanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are endowed by a creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody you’re committing an act of Evil.
Conservatives have been eager to turn elsewhere in search of a cause for such tragedies, unwilling to have a serious discussion over gun control. But studies [ http://www.nyupress.org/bullysociety/dataonschoolshootings.pdf ] have shown that school shootings are occurring with more frequency than ever before, curiously mirroring the expansion [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/05/national_parks_gun_law_take_ef.html ] of gun rights [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062802134.html ] across the country.
Update
On Wednesday, Gingrich appeared on The Huffington Post’s live broadcast [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/newt-gingrich-guns-schools_n_2330905.html (fifth item below)] and dug a bit deeper. “School administrators should be trained and should have arms that are available under lock and key,” he told host Marc Lamont Hill. Gingrich joins many other conservatives who have taken Friday’s tragedy as an opportunity to push for loosening restrictions on deadly weapons even further and introducing more guns into elementary schools and other public facilities.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/19/1358021/newt-gingrich-blames-anti-religious-secular-government-for-newtown-shooting/ [with comments]
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Vatican Says Gay Couples Live In 'A Different Reality,' Same-Sex Marriage A False 'Utopia'
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 12/19/2012 1:33 pm EST | Updated: 12/19/2012 1:48 pm EST
The Vatican is taking issue with the fight for marriage equality in Europe and around the world, saying that same-sex couples live in a "different reality" and continue to chase the "utopia" of equality.
L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, printed a front-page editorial [ http://www.osservatoreromano.va/orportal-portlets-portal/detail/binaries/pdf_quotidiano/quotidiano290.pdf ] on Monday titled "Marriage Is Not a Contract," claiming, according to a Google translation of the text, that same-sex couples live in some sort of "different reality" where they believe the foundations of society will not quake if an "utopia" of equality, which "caused such damage in the twentieth century," is achieved.
Via Think Progress [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/18/1354561/vatican-editorial-claims-gay-couples-exist-in-a-different-reality/ ]:
Saying that marriage between a woman and a man is equal to that between two homosexuals is, in fact, a denial of the truth that affects one of the basic structures of human society, the family. We cannot base a society on these foundations without then paying a very high price as happened in the past when there was an attempt to achieve total economic and social equality. Why repeat the same mistake and chase after an unattainable utopia?
The Vatican's editorial condemns same-sex couples adopting children, stating that this will only lead to "new forms of exploitation" in science, according to a Google translation.
The article also criticizes a piece that appeared in the French Catholic weekly Temoignage Chretien, which endorsed the country’s controversial gay marriage bill [ http://www.queerty.com/vatican-claims-gays-in-a-different-reality-chasing-after-an-unattainable-utopia-20121218/ ], according to Queerty. The Vatican says the French article seeks to only promote what is trendy, reports The Hindu Business Line. “Being Catholic is about much more [ http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/article4213534.ece ] than embracing fashionable cultural standpoints," writes the Vatican.
The editorial follows Pope Benedict XVI's declaration that same-sex marriage goes against nature and threatens justice and peace [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/pope-gay-marriage-threat-justice-peace-world-day-of-peace-2013_n_2303534.html ].
"There is…a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union," he said during his World Day of Peace 2013 address Friday. "Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society. These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity."
On Sunday, gay rights activists peacefully picketed in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City during the pope's weekly prayers to proest his anti-gay comments [ http://www.queerty.com/watch-peaceful-protest-over-popes-anti-gay-comments-broken-up-by-vatican-police-20121217/ ]. An online campaign featuring photos of LGBT people [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/condividilove-italian-lgbt-group-pop-benedict-xvi-gay-marriage_n_2324254.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices ] with the phrase "I am a threat to peace" was also launched in Italy and has already posted thousands of images to its Facebook page.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/vatican-gay-couples-different-reality-same-sex-marriage-utopia_n_2331391.html [with comments]
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Was Jesus Gay? New Zealand Church Billboard, Bishop's Remarks On Christ's Sexuality Spark Controversy
Posted: 12/18/2012 9:01 am EST | Updated: 12/18/2012 11:08 am EST
A church billboard questioning Jesus Christ's sexuality is sparking controversy in New Zealand.
As Auckland Now reports [ http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/8090086/Church-billboard-was-Jesus-gay ], St. Matthew in the City's holiday billboard depicts the infant Jesus surrounded by a rainbow-colored halo, along with the double entendre-laden statement: "It's Christmas. Time for Jesus to come out."
Reverend Glynn Cardy defended the church's sign as being about trying to lift the humanity of Jesus. "The fact is we don't know what his sexual orientation was," he is quoted as saying. "Would it make a difference if he was gay? Would that change the picture for you?"
News of the billboard comes just as Bishop Gene Robinson -- the first openly gay bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church -- told Jon Stewart he believes Jesus Christ who have approved of gay families [ http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/12/17/bishop-gene-robinson-jesus-was-pro-gay-and-spent-most-of-his-time-with-12-men/ ] and LGBT relationships in general.
"Here’s a guy who -- in a culture that virtually demanded marriage -- was a single guy, spent most of his time with twelve men, singled out three of them for leadership and one of them is known in the Bible as ‘the one whom Jesus loved,’” Robinson, who is promoting his new book, "God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage [ http://www.amazon.com/God-Believes-Love-Straight-Marriage/dp/0307957888 ]," told Stewart. "Now I’m not saying Jesus was gay, but let’s be careful to rope this guy in for a husband, wife and 2.2 children model for family. He knew about families of choice, and so do LGBT people."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/was-jesus-gay-church-billboard-gene-robinson_n_2315837.html [with the Robinson/Stewart Daily Show segment (original at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-10-2012/gene-robinson ) embedded, and comments]
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'No Religion' Is World's Third-Largest Religious Group After Christians, Muslims According To Pew Study
12/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/unaffiliated-third-largest-religious-group-after-christians-muslims_n_2323664.html [with embedded video report, and comments; the Pew study at http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape-exec.aspx ]
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Family: Newtown boy's favorite teacher died cradling him in her arms
By Andrew Mach, NBC News
November 18, 2012
As families struggle to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., some are clinging to bits of solace from the grim details that emerge.
The family of six-year-old Dylan Hockley, one of the 20 children killed in the shootings last Friday, revealed in a statement Monday that their child's favorite teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary cradled him as they both died in a hail of bullets.
"We take great comfort in knowing that Dylan was not alone when he died but was wrapped in the arms of his amazing aide, Anne Marie Murphy," Dylan’s family said in a statement. "Dylan loved Mrs. Murphy so much and pointed at her picture on our refrigerator every day."
Murphy, 52, a mother to four children with her husband, Michael, was a special education teacher in Dylan’s classroom at Sandy Hook. She was a 14-year resident of Sandy Hook and formerly of Katonah, N.Y., according to her obituary.
"She will be remembered for her love of the arts, walks in the outdoors and most importantly: her family," her obituary said.
Authorities reportedly told Murphy's parents, Hugh and Alice McGowan, that their daughter helped shield some of her students from the rain of bullets.
“A first responder said she was a hero,” her 86-year-old father told Newsday. “You don’t expect your daughter to be murdered. That’s sort of a shocker.”
Murphy’s mother, also 86, said she grabbed her rosary and cried when she got the news.
Dylan’s parents, Ian Thomas, who is British, and Nicole Marie (Moretti), both 42, had lived in England for 18 years before moving to a house on the same street as Nancy Lanza, the gunman's mother and first victim, in January, The Telegraph (U.K.) reported. They said they chose Newtown specifically for the tight-knit community and the Sandy Hook school.
“We do not and shall never regret this choice,” they said. “Our boys have flourished here and our family’s happiness has been limitless.”
The family also praised other staffers and teachers who died at Sandy Hook.
"We cannot speak highly enough of Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, exceptional women who knew both our children and who specifically helped us navigate Dylan's special education needs," Dylan's family added. "Dylan's teacher, Vicki Soto, was warm and funny and Dylan loved her dearly."
Both Hochsprung, 47, the school principal, and Sherlach, 56, the school psychologist, died while lunging at the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, in an attempt to overpower him. Soto, 27, a first-grade teacher, shielded her students and ushered them into a closet, putting herself between them and the gunman. She was found huddled with the children.
"Though our hearts break for Dylan, they are also filled with love for these and other beautiful women who all selflessly died trying to save our children," the family said.
In the statement, the Hockley family said Dylan loved to cuddle, bounce on his trampoline and play computer games. He also looked up to his older brother, Jake. He was learning to read and "was so proud when he read us a new book every day."
"We will always be a family of four," they said. "He is forever in our hearts and minds."
© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/18/15994142-family-newtown-boys-favorite-teacher-died-cradling-him-in-her-arms [with comments]
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Newt Gingrich: Give Guns To School Administrators (VIDEO)
Posted: 12/19/2012 1:15 pm EST | Updated: 12/19/2012 10:33 pm EST
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sat down with Sam Stein and Marc Lamont Hill at HuffPost Live Wednesday to talk gun control days after the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The former presidential hopeful said he agreed with Virginia governor Bob McDonnell that arming teachers might be a solution to the problem of school shootings saying "school administrators should be trained and should have arms that are available under lock and key."
"If that principal who lost her life had been able to step in the door and kill him," Gingrich continued, "we would have saved a tremendous number of lives."
Gingrich dismissed immediate calls for new gun legislation, however.
"More gun control might be good PR, it might make people feel better," he said, but he later pointed out that even in states with strong laws, "there are thousands of people killed annually by criminals who apparently don't pay attention to gun control."
Watch the full segment at HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/newt-gingrich%2C-fiscal-cliff/50c8e9262b8c2a2ff6000406 ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/newt-gingrich-guns-schools_n_2330905.html [with the relevant portion of the full segment embedded, and comments]
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Sandy Hook School Probably Well Prepared as Heroes Emerge After Massacre
By: Jim McKay on December 18, 2012
There are many more questions than answers about the shooting that took the lives of 20 kids and six administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. But in general schools and businesses can and should examine their emergency plans and how they would respond, not only during a shooting, but also during various potential hazards.
Emergency plans should be for all hazards, not just for an active shooter situation and should include trainings that incorporate everyone associated with that school or business, according to Bo Mitchell of 911 Consulting.
“The chilling fact is it’s happened before and it will happen again,” Mitchell said. “One danger here is that we always prepare for the last crisis, so we are all preparing for Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Both are devastating, but employers have to prepare for all hazards — bomb threats, suspicious packages, bullying at work and bullying at school are examples.”
Mitchell said schools are employers first and most employers, including schools, are not well prepared. “For every one organization that is well planned and trained and exercised, there are 10 that are not,” he said. “Every employee has a legal right to review their employers’ emergency plan. That’s federal law.”
Mitchell said schools and businesses all have the same problem: they think they are well prepared but they’re not. He says there is ample research, done by the Government Accountability Office, the National Association of School Resource Officers and other national organizations that point to a lack of preparedness for K-12 schools and businesses.
The research shows that most schools have paperwork they call a plan but it’s not all hazards and they don’t train all their employees as required by federal law. “They’ll train “the team” but they don’t train all employees and for emergency purposes that’s the contractors, the cafeteria staff, the security people and grandma who volunteers in the gift shop,” Mitchell said.
“They should train coaches, temps, volunteers, everyone because when something goes wrong all those people will be considered employees at court, even if they didn’t get a paycheck.”
Mitchell said research indicates that schools aren’t well prepared because they don’t exercise. “Table top exercises, full-scale exercises done with and without emergency services in concert. Both are great and more is better and they aren’t doing it,” he said. “Some of this is ‘Oh, we’ll scare the children or we’ll scare the parents.’ That’s bull. Locking down a school is very difficult, but that doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to do that.”
The ‘Plan’
Every school principal will answer in the affirmative when asked if his/her school has a disaster plan. But is that plan being exercised or is it “on the shelf?”
“A lot of it is on the shelf, a lot of it isn’t all hazards, a lot of it isn’t trained,” Mitchell said. “OHSA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration} says school is a workplace. It says before you’re a school, you’re a workplace and every employee shall be trained in emergency planning, annually in a classroom. This is not happening on a wide spectrum from Maine to California.”
The reasons vary, from lack of education, to politics to denial and of course, a lack of resources.
The feeling that “it won’t happen to us” is ubiquitous in the U.S., including schools and businesses. Couple that with the fact that school administrators aren’t emergency managers and parents of students going to those schools may not know what questions to ask those administrators about emergency plans and it equals lack of preparation.
“Public schools tend to turn to their police chiefs and fire chiefs, which is all well and good but they’re busy people and if all schools showed up at the police and fire departments, the system would collapse,” Mitchell said.
He also said politics play a role in that police and fire aren’t going to go to parents because they’d be going over the heads of boards of education. And boards of education are reluctant to turn to parents because they’re busy running schools and taking on security too is a daunting thought.
Mitchell said parents should ask school administrators if they have a plan, if it’s all hazards, if it conforms to the National Fire Protection Association 1600 Standard on Disaster/Emergency Management and Business Continuity Programs, and have they trained it annually in a classroom and have you trained enough people, including the grandma in the gift shop.
Mitchell said that as time goes on we’ll probably be looking at Sandy Hook as a school that was well prepared and look at the administrators who lost their lives as heroes. School administrators ran toward the gunman as they heard shots and teachers hid students while leaving themselves vulnerable.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find out they were well trained and well exercised and those six women who died were heroes,” he said. “They knew what to do and in so doing probably kept this from getting a lot worse, which is very cold comfort to those 20 kids who died.”
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Related
Sandy Hook School Shooting: Run for your life!
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/disaster-zone/sandy-hook-school-shooting-run-for-your-life-121612.html
Doomsday Preppers are Socially Selfish
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/campus/Doomsday-Preppers-Emergency-Management-112912.html
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® 2012 e.Republic, Inc.
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Sandy-Hook-School-Probably-Well-Prepared.html [with comments]
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Thanks To Budget Cuts, U.S. Remains Unprepared To Combat Future Public Health Emergencies
Dec 19, 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/12/19/1360611/budget-cuts-future-public-health-emergencies/ [referencing http://www.healthyamericans.org/report/101/ ; no comments yet]
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Sandy Hook Shooting Exposed As a Fraud
Fathers of slain children do not go around joking and laughing the next day this guy is a fraud and he is an actor and so is the aunt that spoke before him and this entire shooting is a scam to take away gun right for a much bigger global domination plan.the father of the shooter was also to testify over the libor scandal.as he was VP of GE and Webber Paine company that suites were filed against and documented at stanford advocates web site,both aurora and Sandy Hook were referenced in the Batman move dark knight rises
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrRcgB581w
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A Letter To Sandy Hook Victim, 6-Year-Old Jack Pinto, From His Best Friend
"Jack, You are my best friend. We had fun together. I will miss you. I will talk to you in my prayers. I love you Jack. Love, John"
12/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/letter-to-jack-pinto_n_2324164.html [with comments]
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(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82637110 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82640839 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82641144 and following
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(and just to note it after taking a few minutes to keep clicking back [was curious] -- the origin post of this string: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52962262 )
Victoria Soto, 27-year-old teacher killed while protecting her students.
By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm
If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.
National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/17/1347291/top-conservative-magazine-newtown-massacre-is-the-price-we-pay-for-the-second-amendment/ ], published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist [ http://feministing.com/2008/03/02/the_washington_post_bitches_ai/ ] Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335996/newtown-answers-nro-symposium ]”:
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
Via Jessica Valenti [ http://jessicavalenti.tumblr.com/post/38310906793/national-review-newtown-could-have-been-avoided-if-a ], who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.”
Allen went on to blame Lanza’s mother, saying “You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons…Unfortunately, the idea of being an ‘adult’ and a ‘man’ once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/19/1361521/top-conservative-publication-newtown-happened-because-women-ran-the-school/ [with comments]
===
'Light amidst the darkness': Heroic teacher Victoria Soto remembered
Victoria Soto, 27, first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook elementary. Soto had taught for five years and was known by students as silly and loving.
Obtained by NBC News
By Tracy Connor, Sandra Lilley and Tom Winter, NBC News
December 19, 2012
One of Newtown’s heroic teachers – remembered as a bright light on the darkest of days – was laid to rest Wednesday, with family friend Paul Simon performing the folk song “Sound of Silence [ http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2012/12/19/16021164-paul-simon-performs-sound-of-silence-at-funeral-for-sandy-hook-teacher ].”
Mourners who arrived at a church in Stratford, Conn., for Victoria Soto’s funeral were handed ribbons of green, her favorite color.
They spoke of the 27-year-old’s selfless final act: She died trying to protect her first-grade students at Sandy Hook Elementary School from rifle fire during the massacre, according to her family.
“Truthfully, you have been a hero to me for a lot longer than five days,” said her sister, Jillian Soto, according to the Stamford Advocate [ http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Funerals-wakes-for-6-more-victims-4130907.php ]. "You've been my big sister. The one I always looked up to."
Another sister, Carlee, sobbed as she spoke. "The pain is unbelievable," she said.
Outside, family friend Ryan Ortiz, 27, said he couldn’t help thinking if he would have been as courageous as Soto.
“Mind-boggling what she had to go through,” Ortiz said. “No matter how many times I sit at home and think of what I would have done, you just can't imagine being in that situation.
“In my opinion, she was that light amidst the darkness that was going on that day in that school,” Ortiz said. “There's really no other way to remember her than being that light in that room."
Simon was asked by the Soto family to perform at the service; his sister-in-law, a nurse, is close to Soto’s mother, also a nurse. He came and left without comment.
Soto, who was in her fifth year of teaching, was finishing up her daily morning meeting with the students of Classroom 10 when gunman Adam Lanza began his rampage Friday morning.
Relatives say they were told she hurried the kids she called her "angels" into a closet behind her and tried to shield them from the bullets.
Some of the children in her class managed to survive the slaughter. Many did not.
Funerals were held Wednesday for first-graders Charlotte Bacon, Caroline Previdi and Daniel Barden, and a wake was held for 7-year-old Chase Kowalski – continuing a week of mourning.
A large contingent of firefighters arrived for 7-year-old Daniel’s funeral at St. Rome of Lima church in Newtown, where the strains of bagpipes filled the air.
Two of his relatives are members of the New York City Fire Department, and he dreamed of wearing a uniform when he grew up, according to a Facebook post from a firefighters’ foundation.
"It was one of the hardest funerals I was ever at,” FDNY Lt. Eric Torres told NBCNewYork.com [ http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Newtown-Sandy-Hook-Elementary-School-Shooting-Grief-Mourning-Children-Funeral-184075371.html ].
Family friend Laura Stamberg, of New Paltz, N.Y., said that on the day of the shooting, Daniel’s father Mark spent precious moments with him, teaching him a Christmas song on the piano.
"They played foosball and then he taught him the song and then he walked him to the bus and that was their last morning together," Stamberg told the Associated Press.
At a funeral where mourners wore buttons with her picture, 6-year-old redhead Charlotte was recalled as a ball of energy who loved the color pink and wanted to be a veterinarian. Caroline was “just a doll,” was just a doll," family friend Pam Fehrs said. "She was happy – dancing and happy everywhere she went."
Later on Wednesday, hundreds attended a wake in Woodbury, Conn., for Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Hochsprung, 47, who also has been hailed as a hero for running toward the sound of gunfire after Lanza blasted his way into the school.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman came to pay their respects at Munson Lovetere Funeral Home, where candles in paper bags, arranged to spell HOPE, were laid out on the front lawn.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan also attended. Earlier in the day, he said Hochsprung and five other staffers killed at Sandy Hook “made the ultimate sacrifice, literally laying down their lives to protect the children they taught and cared for.”
“If it was not for the quick and courageous response of other teachers and staff, even more children and adults might have died,” he said.
Some of the services have been marked not just by tears, but by calls for tougher gun laws. Miguel Padilla, who works with Soto’s father, said he hoped the unity shown in the wake of the tragedy would translate into legislative action.
“With assault rifles, there is no need for those,” he said outside the church. “If you need to protect yourself, a handgun is good enough. That a 20-year old can get his hands on [an assault rifle] is pathetic.
“Something big has to come out of this,” he added. “They have to change the law.”
NBC News' Courtney Hazlett contributed to this report.
*
Related
NBCLatino: Soto remembered as a hero and a giving soul
http://nbclatino.com/2012/12/19/victoria-soto-remembered-as-a-hero-and-giving-soul/
*
© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/19/16001132-light-amidst-the-darkness-heroic-teacher-victoria-soto-remembered [with comments]
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Victoria Soto Sacrificed Herself To Protect Her Students
Published on Dec 19, 2012 by Queuenews
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SvkDNmOqKQ
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Newt Gingrich Blames ‘Anti-Religious’ Secular Government For Newtown Shooting
Former presidential candidate and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
By Adam Peck on Dec 19, 2012 at 9:45 am
During a local talk radio show early Wednesday morning, former Speaker Newt Gingrich
[(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73012285 ] cast his lot with the religious right by blaming last week’s tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut on secularism and immoral video games.
Gingrich joined host Brian Thomas of 55KRC in Cincinnati [ http://www.55krc.com/pages/onair_BrianThomas.html ] to discuss his latest book, but the conversation quickly pivoted towards gun control and why godlessness in our schools is really to blame:
When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.
Listen to the remarks:
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/#thinkpro/gingrich-on-guns ) embedded]
Gingrich is perhaps the most prominent Republican yet to blame godlessness for the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/14/1339971/huckabee-says-connecticut-school-massacre-occurred-because-we-removed-god-from-our-schools/ ] on the day of the shooting that the tragedy occurred because we “removed God from our schools,” while televangelist James Dobson blamed [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/17/1347161/james-dobson-blames-marriage-equality-and-abortion-for-newtown-shooting/ ] gay marriage and abortion.
This is also not the first time Gingrich has sought to blame secularism and video game manufacturers for causing a school shooting. After the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, he appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos and made a very similar argument [ http://www.gameology.org/node/1484 ]:
I think the fact is if you look at the amount of violence in games that young people play, at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the de-humanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are endowed by a creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody you’re committing an act of Evil.
Conservatives have been eager to turn elsewhere in search of a cause for such tragedies, unwilling to have a serious discussion over gun control. But studies [ http://www.nyupress.org/bullysociety/dataonschoolshootings.pdf ] have shown that school shootings are occurring with more frequency than ever before, curiously mirroring the expansion [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/05/national_parks_gun_law_take_ef.html ] of gun rights [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062802134.html ] across the country.
Update
On Wednesday, Gingrich appeared on The Huffington Post’s live broadcast [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/newt-gingrich-guns-schools_n_2330905.html (fifth item below)] and dug a bit deeper. “School administrators should be trained and should have arms that are available under lock and key,” he told host Marc Lamont Hill. Gingrich joins many other conservatives who have taken Friday’s tragedy as an opportunity to push for loosening restrictions on deadly weapons even further and introducing more guns into elementary schools and other public facilities.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/19/1358021/newt-gingrich-blames-anti-religious-secular-government-for-newtown-shooting/ [with comments]
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Vatican Says Gay Couples Live In 'A Different Reality,' Same-Sex Marriage A False 'Utopia'
By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 12/19/2012 1:33 pm EST | Updated: 12/19/2012 1:48 pm EST
The Vatican is taking issue with the fight for marriage equality in Europe and around the world, saying that same-sex couples live in a "different reality" and continue to chase the "utopia" of equality.
L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, printed a front-page editorial [ http://www.osservatoreromano.va/orportal-portlets-portal/detail/binaries/pdf_quotidiano/quotidiano290.pdf ] on Monday titled "Marriage Is Not a Contract," claiming, according to a Google translation of the text, that same-sex couples live in some sort of "different reality" where they believe the foundations of society will not quake if an "utopia" of equality, which "caused such damage in the twentieth century," is achieved.
Via Think Progress [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/18/1354561/vatican-editorial-claims-gay-couples-exist-in-a-different-reality/ ]:
Saying that marriage between a woman and a man is equal to that between two homosexuals is, in fact, a denial of the truth that affects one of the basic structures of human society, the family. We cannot base a society on these foundations without then paying a very high price as happened in the past when there was an attempt to achieve total economic and social equality. Why repeat the same mistake and chase after an unattainable utopia?
The Vatican's editorial condemns same-sex couples adopting children, stating that this will only lead to "new forms of exploitation" in science, according to a Google translation.
The article also criticizes a piece that appeared in the French Catholic weekly Temoignage Chretien, which endorsed the country’s controversial gay marriage bill [ http://www.queerty.com/vatican-claims-gays-in-a-different-reality-chasing-after-an-unattainable-utopia-20121218/ ], according to Queerty. The Vatican says the French article seeks to only promote what is trendy, reports The Hindu Business Line. “Being Catholic is about much more [ http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/article4213534.ece ] than embracing fashionable cultural standpoints," writes the Vatican.
The editorial follows Pope Benedict XVI's declaration that same-sex marriage goes against nature and threatens justice and peace [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/pope-gay-marriage-threat-justice-peace-world-day-of-peace-2013_n_2303534.html ].
"There is…a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union," he said during his World Day of Peace 2013 address Friday. "Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society. These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity."
On Sunday, gay rights activists peacefully picketed in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City during the pope's weekly prayers to proest his anti-gay comments [ http://www.queerty.com/watch-peaceful-protest-over-popes-anti-gay-comments-broken-up-by-vatican-police-20121217/ ]. An online campaign featuring photos of LGBT people [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/condividilove-italian-lgbt-group-pop-benedict-xvi-gay-marriage_n_2324254.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices ] with the phrase "I am a threat to peace" was also launched in Italy and has already posted thousands of images to its Facebook page.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/vatican-gay-couples-different-reality-same-sex-marriage-utopia_n_2331391.html [with comments]
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Was Jesus Gay? New Zealand Church Billboard, Bishop's Remarks On Christ's Sexuality Spark Controversy
Posted: 12/18/2012 9:01 am EST | Updated: 12/18/2012 11:08 am EST
A church billboard questioning Jesus Christ's sexuality is sparking controversy in New Zealand.
As Auckland Now reports [ http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/8090086/Church-billboard-was-Jesus-gay ], St. Matthew in the City's holiday billboard depicts the infant Jesus surrounded by a rainbow-colored halo, along with the double entendre-laden statement: "It's Christmas. Time for Jesus to come out."
Reverend Glynn Cardy defended the church's sign as being about trying to lift the humanity of Jesus. "The fact is we don't know what his sexual orientation was," he is quoted as saying. "Would it make a difference if he was gay? Would that change the picture for you?"
News of the billboard comes just as Bishop Gene Robinson -- the first openly gay bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church -- told Jon Stewart he believes Jesus Christ who have approved of gay families [ http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/12/17/bishop-gene-robinson-jesus-was-pro-gay-and-spent-most-of-his-time-with-12-men/ ] and LGBT relationships in general.
"Here’s a guy who -- in a culture that virtually demanded marriage -- was a single guy, spent most of his time with twelve men, singled out three of them for leadership and one of them is known in the Bible as ‘the one whom Jesus loved,’” Robinson, who is promoting his new book, "God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage [ http://www.amazon.com/God-Believes-Love-Straight-Marriage/dp/0307957888 ]," told Stewart. "Now I’m not saying Jesus was gay, but let’s be careful to rope this guy in for a husband, wife and 2.2 children model for family. He knew about families of choice, and so do LGBT people."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/was-jesus-gay-church-billboard-gene-robinson_n_2315837.html [with the Robinson/Stewart Daily Show segment (original at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-10-2012/gene-robinson ) embedded, and comments]
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'No Religion' Is World's Third-Largest Religious Group After Christians, Muslims According To Pew Study
12/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/unaffiliated-third-largest-religious-group-after-christians-muslims_n_2323664.html [with embedded video report, and comments; the Pew study at http://www.pewforum.org/global-religious-landscape-exec.aspx ]
===
Family: Newtown boy's favorite teacher died cradling him in her arms
By Andrew Mach, NBC News
November 18, 2012
As families struggle to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., some are clinging to bits of solace from the grim details that emerge.
The family of six-year-old Dylan Hockley, one of the 20 children killed in the shootings last Friday, revealed in a statement Monday that their child's favorite teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary cradled him as they both died in a hail of bullets.
"We take great comfort in knowing that Dylan was not alone when he died but was wrapped in the arms of his amazing aide, Anne Marie Murphy," Dylan’s family said in a statement. "Dylan loved Mrs. Murphy so much and pointed at her picture on our refrigerator every day."
Murphy, 52, a mother to four children with her husband, Michael, was a special education teacher in Dylan’s classroom at Sandy Hook. She was a 14-year resident of Sandy Hook and formerly of Katonah, N.Y., according to her obituary.
"She will be remembered for her love of the arts, walks in the outdoors and most importantly: her family," her obituary said.
Authorities reportedly told Murphy's parents, Hugh and Alice McGowan, that their daughter helped shield some of her students from the rain of bullets.
“A first responder said she was a hero,” her 86-year-old father told Newsday. “You don’t expect your daughter to be murdered. That’s sort of a shocker.”
Murphy’s mother, also 86, said she grabbed her rosary and cried when she got the news.
Dylan’s parents, Ian Thomas, who is British, and Nicole Marie (Moretti), both 42, had lived in England for 18 years before moving to a house on the same street as Nancy Lanza, the gunman's mother and first victim, in January, The Telegraph (U.K.) reported. They said they chose Newtown specifically for the tight-knit community and the Sandy Hook school.
“We do not and shall never regret this choice,” they said. “Our boys have flourished here and our family’s happiness has been limitless.”
The family also praised other staffers and teachers who died at Sandy Hook.
"We cannot speak highly enough of Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, exceptional women who knew both our children and who specifically helped us navigate Dylan's special education needs," Dylan's family added. "Dylan's teacher, Vicki Soto, was warm and funny and Dylan loved her dearly."
Both Hochsprung, 47, the school principal, and Sherlach, 56, the school psychologist, died while lunging at the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, in an attempt to overpower him. Soto, 27, a first-grade teacher, shielded her students and ushered them into a closet, putting herself between them and the gunman. She was found huddled with the children.
"Though our hearts break for Dylan, they are also filled with love for these and other beautiful women who all selflessly died trying to save our children," the family said.
In the statement, the Hockley family said Dylan loved to cuddle, bounce on his trampoline and play computer games. He also looked up to his older brother, Jake. He was learning to read and "was so proud when he read us a new book every day."
"We will always be a family of four," they said. "He is forever in our hearts and minds."
© 2012 NBCNews.com
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/18/15994142-family-newtown-boys-favorite-teacher-died-cradling-him-in-her-arms [with comments]
===
Newt Gingrich: Give Guns To School Administrators (VIDEO)
Posted: 12/19/2012 1:15 pm EST | Updated: 12/19/2012 10:33 pm EST
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sat down with Sam Stein and Marc Lamont Hill at HuffPost Live Wednesday to talk gun control days after the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The former presidential hopeful said he agreed with Virginia governor Bob McDonnell that arming teachers might be a solution to the problem of school shootings saying "school administrators should be trained and should have arms that are available under lock and key."
"If that principal who lost her life had been able to step in the door and kill him," Gingrich continued, "we would have saved a tremendous number of lives."
Gingrich dismissed immediate calls for new gun legislation, however.
"More gun control might be good PR, it might make people feel better," he said, but he later pointed out that even in states with strong laws, "there are thousands of people killed annually by criminals who apparently don't pay attention to gun control."
Watch the full segment at HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/newt-gingrich%2C-fiscal-cliff/50c8e9262b8c2a2ff6000406 ].
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/newt-gingrich-guns-schools_n_2330905.html [with the relevant portion of the full segment embedded, and comments]
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Sandy Hook School Probably Well Prepared as Heroes Emerge After Massacre
By: Jim McKay on December 18, 2012
There are many more questions than answers about the shooting that took the lives of 20 kids and six administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. But in general schools and businesses can and should examine their emergency plans and how they would respond, not only during a shooting, but also during various potential hazards.
Emergency plans should be for all hazards, not just for an active shooter situation and should include trainings that incorporate everyone associated with that school or business, according to Bo Mitchell of 911 Consulting.
“The chilling fact is it’s happened before and it will happen again,” Mitchell said. “One danger here is that we always prepare for the last crisis, so we are all preparing for Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Both are devastating, but employers have to prepare for all hazards — bomb threats, suspicious packages, bullying at work and bullying at school are examples.”
Mitchell said schools are employers first and most employers, including schools, are not well prepared. “For every one organization that is well planned and trained and exercised, there are 10 that are not,” he said. “Every employee has a legal right to review their employers’ emergency plan. That’s federal law.”
Mitchell said schools and businesses all have the same problem: they think they are well prepared but they’re not. He says there is ample research, done by the Government Accountability Office, the National Association of School Resource Officers and other national organizations that point to a lack of preparedness for K-12 schools and businesses.
The research shows that most schools have paperwork they call a plan but it’s not all hazards and they don’t train all their employees as required by federal law. “They’ll train “the team” but they don’t train all employees and for emergency purposes that’s the contractors, the cafeteria staff, the security people and grandma who volunteers in the gift shop,” Mitchell said.
“They should train coaches, temps, volunteers, everyone because when something goes wrong all those people will be considered employees at court, even if they didn’t get a paycheck.”
Mitchell said research indicates that schools aren’t well prepared because they don’t exercise. “Table top exercises, full-scale exercises done with and without emergency services in concert. Both are great and more is better and they aren’t doing it,” he said. “Some of this is ‘Oh, we’ll scare the children or we’ll scare the parents.’ That’s bull. Locking down a school is very difficult, but that doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to do that.”
The ‘Plan’
Every school principal will answer in the affirmative when asked if his/her school has a disaster plan. But is that plan being exercised or is it “on the shelf?”
“A lot of it is on the shelf, a lot of it isn’t all hazards, a lot of it isn’t trained,” Mitchell said. “OHSA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration} says school is a workplace. It says before you’re a school, you’re a workplace and every employee shall be trained in emergency planning, annually in a classroom. This is not happening on a wide spectrum from Maine to California.”
The reasons vary, from lack of education, to politics to denial and of course, a lack of resources.
The feeling that “it won’t happen to us” is ubiquitous in the U.S., including schools and businesses. Couple that with the fact that school administrators aren’t emergency managers and parents of students going to those schools may not know what questions to ask those administrators about emergency plans and it equals lack of preparation.
“Public schools tend to turn to their police chiefs and fire chiefs, which is all well and good but they’re busy people and if all schools showed up at the police and fire departments, the system would collapse,” Mitchell said.
He also said politics play a role in that police and fire aren’t going to go to parents because they’d be going over the heads of boards of education. And boards of education are reluctant to turn to parents because they’re busy running schools and taking on security too is a daunting thought.
Mitchell said parents should ask school administrators if they have a plan, if it’s all hazards, if it conforms to the National Fire Protection Association 1600 Standard on Disaster/Emergency Management and Business Continuity Programs, and have they trained it annually in a classroom and have you trained enough people, including the grandma in the gift shop.
Mitchell said that as time goes on we’ll probably be looking at Sandy Hook as a school that was well prepared and look at the administrators who lost their lives as heroes. School administrators ran toward the gunman as they heard shots and teachers hid students while leaving themselves vulnerable.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find out they were well trained and well exercised and those six women who died were heroes,” he said. “They knew what to do and in so doing probably kept this from getting a lot worse, which is very cold comfort to those 20 kids who died.”
*
Related
Sandy Hook School Shooting: Run for your life!
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/disaster-zone/sandy-hook-school-shooting-run-for-your-life-121612.html
Doomsday Preppers are Socially Selfish
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/emergency-blogs/campus/Doomsday-Preppers-Emergency-Management-112912.html
*
® 2012 e.Republic, Inc.
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Sandy-Hook-School-Probably-Well-Prepared.html [with comments]
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Thanks To Budget Cuts, U.S. Remains Unprepared To Combat Future Public Health Emergencies
Dec 19, 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/12/19/1360611/budget-cuts-future-public-health-emergencies/ [referencing http://www.healthyamericans.org/report/101/ ; no comments yet]
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Sandy Hook Shooting Exposed As a Fraud
Published on Dec 17, 2012 by wethecom1
Fathers of slain children do not go around joking and laughing the next day this guy is a fraud and he is an actor and so is the aunt that spoke before him and this entire shooting is a scam to take away gun right for a much bigger global domination plan.the father of the shooter was also to testify over the libor scandal.as he was VP of GE and Webber Paine company that suites were filed against and documented at stanford advocates web site,both aurora and Sandy Hook were referenced in the Batman move dark knight rises
§ 107 . Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrRcgB581w
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A Letter To Sandy Hook Victim, 6-Year-Old Jack Pinto, From His Best Friend
"Jack, You are my best friend. We had fun together. I will miss you. I will talk to you in my prayers. I love you Jack. Love, John"
12/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/18/letter-to-jack-pinto_n_2324164.html [with comments]
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(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82637110 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82640839 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82641144 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82642581 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82646376 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=82650118 and preceding and following
(and just to note it after taking a few minutes to keep clicking back [was curious] -- the origin post of this string: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=52962262 )
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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