Tragic Shooting in Newtown, CT Leaves 28 Dead

On Friday, December 14, 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire in Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing twenty children, six adult staff memebers, his mother, and himself. 

Newtown, Connecticut, the location of the shootings, was considered an idyllic, rural society, with one homicide within the last ten years.

Lanza, according to his brother Ryan, was identified as "mildly autistic." Students and faculty who knew him also considered him "intelligent, but nervous and fidgety."

This shooting, the second deadliest mass shooting in United States history, as well as the recent mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado has spurned conversations of gun control to attempt to formulate an end to these tragedies. 

Michael Bloomberg, the independent mayor of New York City, urged Congress to renew a ban on semi-automatic firearms that expired in 2004, to improve databases that track gun ownership, and to enforce gun sale more strictly. 

President Obama called for "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

Pedro Segarra, the mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, said on ABC's This Week, "We do recognize our constitutional right to bear arms, but I think that this has gone to a point now that -- to afford some people with the ability of conducting these mass exterminations is just not what we want."