EDITORIAL

‘‘This Time There Will BeChange’’

Martha K. Swartz, PhD, RN, CPNP, FAAN

I live in a small town in central Connecticut. A coupleof towns over (about 20 minutes away), is the village ofNewtown, a place so pretty and friendly that when youstop to admire the huge flag pole on the town green orrun into the general store for a cup of coffee, you feel asif you’ve stepped into a Norman Rockwell painting. Allof this changed forever early on Friday morning,December 14, 2012, when amentally deranged shooterwith assault weapons took the lives of 20 first gradersand six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

For so many of us, the fun anticipation of anotherholiday season quickly gave way to desperation asprofound shock turned to unspeakable grief. Webegan to learn the stories of the victims and their fami-lies, and again realized those few degrees of separationthrough which we are all connected. A co-worker ofmy husband’s lost a daughter, a good friend of a staffmember with whom I work with lost a child, and soon. In my own family (with help from my daughter),holiday preparations now turned to ‘‘26 acts of kind-ness,’’ and we struggled to answer the questions ofhow can we help? What can we do?

So now we are back to seemingly age-old policyissues of gun control (particularly whether the ban onassault weapons with high-capacity ammunitionshould be reinstated), the importance of improvedmental health care, and the need (as if Columbine,Aurora, and Virginia Tech were not reminders enough)to take ahard look at violenceprevention in our society.Along with this comes the chatter of protecting SecondAmendment rights and protecting our freedom fromgovernmental control. I try to hear those points ofview, but somebody needs to explain tome just exactly

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what those freedoms are (or should be) in this dayand age, and why our children need to keep payingthe price.Forme, the events inmy home state over the past few

weeks haveput a human face on this public health crisisin a way that no statistics, reports, or publications haveever been able to do. I still wake up in themiddle of thenight, thinking about what the last moments of thosekids’ lives must have been like, but also how all of theadults immediately acted out of pure love for thosechildren. There have to be lessons learned from this–but what are they?Some of the answers will come to us from the Sandy

Hook community itself. In the past couple of weeks,victims’ families and neighbors have created the SandyHook Promise http://www.sandyhookpromise.org/,a nonprofit corporation with a 501c(3) Foundation (inprocess) and a 501c(4) Action Fund. Their overallmission is to support a constructive national dialogueof all of the issues involved, and to ensure that alongwith that dialogue we also take action, not just inWashington but in our local communities as well.The organization is committed to making Newtown,Connecticut, be remembered as the place we came to-gether, not only as a small New England communitybut as a nation, to begin the hard work so that thistype of tragedy does not happen again. The motto ofthe Sandy Hook Promise: ‘‘This Time There Will BeChange.’’At a press conference on January 14, 2013 (the

1-month anniversary of the shootings), to announcethe Sandy Hook Promise, bereaved parents made itclear that they choose love, belief, and hope insteadof anger. David and Francine Wheeler, who lost theirsonBen,were twoof several parentswho rose to speak.Mr. Wheeler noted that a meaning of the word ‘‘parent’’means point of origin, and he emphatically stated thathe and his wife are nowhere near done at being thebest possible parents they can be for Ben. And he askedus all: what is it worth to keep our children safe? In lis-tening to these parents tell their stories, I know–as do allof you–that doing nothing is no longer an option.

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