Sandy Hook elementary school shooting ~ Bottom Line with Raza Fayyaz

Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school was the worst in a string of sad events in the recent years. Whether the shooting happened at a school, shopping mall, Temple, movie theater or outside in the bright daylight our response has disturbingly been similar with no real results.

A typical sequence of actions consists of:

News comes out

News agencies rush to the scene and make the survivors and their families relive the traumatic event through series of investigative questions; in Sandy Hook's case, Reuters was seen pushing 2nd graders to tell the stories in detail.

Argument breaks

Once the news is broken the anti-gun and pro-gun groups, the liberals and the democrats get busy defending their stances and attacking the opposite views. Finally the whole country erupts into a giant argument which goes on for some time.

Fundraising begins

The arguments help each side make their cases that their views are under attack and they need money to defend them. So the fundraising begins and the public donates to their causes; guns and ammunition sales go up and the lobbying bases gets their funding refueled.

Funds are also raised for the victims, their families and the survivors through charitable organizations.

The shooter becomes a household name

The news agencies drop their normal programming and proceed to run a continuous report containing the shooter's biography, face images and analysis on his/her state of mind. Due to these 24 hour reports the shooter becomes a household name and everyone knows his/her life story.

Some news outlets present reports about these shootings addressed in a statistical way comparing one shooter with another one from past making it sound as if they are trying to show who was more “bad ass” among different shootings in the US history.

Victims are forgotten

It is sad that tragedies like this turns the shooter into a household name but no one remembers the names of the victims. The victims and their families are usually forgotten and no one bothers to follow up on the survivors and their families.

Bottom Line

The media should try not to consciously or unconsciously glorify these shootings as a scoring game; regardless of how many innocent victims perish a tragedy is tragedy and should be treated as such. Times like this are not an event to argue but to help families affected by the tragedy in any way possible.

There were some truly heroic actions taken by some of the victims and survivors - whether turning on the microphone to the PA system or standing between the gunman and students or any number of other actions, they need to be recognized.

Many of these shootings took away families’ primary bread winners, a husband, wife, child, father or a mother. As a nation and a human being we should not forget these victims and should help them in any way we can. In the coming days many of these kids will need to be counseled to ease the pain of the trauma they went through. This event will have long term effects on the parents; they will find it hard to send their kids to school without worrying about them. Good counseling should be provided to instill their trust in the community.