Now that I’m not quite so worked up, this purports to be a letter that one child at Sandy Hook Elementary wrote to his mother today while waiting for police. I have seen nothing to indicate that it is not true, and a couple of references to it outside of twitter that it is true. Maybe it’s not true. In a way, I suppose that I hope it isn’t. No society that is worthy of continuation would ever allow its children to suffer this kind of terror when possessing the power to prevent it.
Unabogie
What is that?
Matt
Pretty sure this isn’t fron today.
Hypatia's Momma
I don’t get it. Is this supposed to be some thoughtful letter from an about-to-be-murdered child who took the time to carefully write this out while bullets took out his friends and classmates?
Matt
Pretty sure this isn’t from today.
Gemina13
I had a brother who was killed at age 7. My mother kept his last drawing till the day she died.
If Brian wrote that today, his mother is going to treasure that note, and it is going to rip her heart to shreds.
I thought I was done crying. I was wrong. Poor baby. What the hell made him think he wasn’t a good son? His parents were probably overjoyed with him.
gogol's wife
@Hypatia’s Momma:
I think someone in another thread said it was one of the kids in one of the other classes as they were being hidden by their teacher, and he wrote it “just in case.” But I’m not sure.
Corner Stone
What the fuck is this. You can’t just post this with nothing. What is this?
scav
An explicit chain of evidence would be nice after the twitter trolling during NYC Sandy and the fake photos posted before.
Howard Beale IV
Check to see if the EXIF data was scrubbed-that way you’ll know if its been doctored or not.
Maude
@Corner Stone:
How are you doing?
I don’t know what this is.
Villago Delenda Est
There is nothing, absolutely nothing as devastating as a parent losing a child.
You expect to bury your parents, not bury your children.
When my brother died, my dad, who was as stoic a Scots-Irish guy that you ever would have run into, could not stop sobbing.
And this way…a senseless act of violence…only amplifies the pain.
My thoughts are with the families dealing with this tragic, senseless loss of lives not yet lived.
Mnemosyne
I’ve also been trying to figure out what the provenance of this letter is — was it supposedly written under fire? Is the kid who wrote it supposed to be dead or alive?
JustAnotherBob
In a few weeks Barrack Obama will be starting his second term as President of the United States.
Perhaps we should use the coming four years to turn things around.
Make the next four years the time during which the American people woke up, quit letting the greedy grab too large of a share, stopped the fossil fuel industries from ruining the climate, and took high capacity weapons away from gun nuts.
There are more of us than there are of them.
Lurker
@JustAnotherBob:
A Facebook acquaintance who lives in Texas insists that he needs high capacity magazines to defend himself from feral pigs near his ranch. He repeats this with each new gun tragedy. I have not yet checked his FB page today to see if today’s news has made him change his mind.
Gemina13
It’s a link posted by Jill in John’s thread below: It was written by a student at Sandy Hook, who along with his classmates composed something for their parents in case . . .
Oh, fuck it, I can’t write that. I don’t want to think about little kids writing good-bye notes to their parents.
KS in MA
@JustAnotherBob: This.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: supposedly written by a child who had been herded with his classmates into a locked area away from the shooting.
Maude
@Soonergrunt:
Why would someone make this public if this is for real? This is private.
whidgy
A simple tragedy just isn’t enough. We need a good dollop of treacly whip cream on top!
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Lurker: I hope your FB acquaintance posts under a fake name. I for one would never want to admit to the world that I could be such a shitty shot as to need a thirty-round magazine to take out a few wild porkers.
Karen in GA
@Gemina13: He and his classmates wrote goodbye letters? Did they take it upon themselves to do this? Or did the teacher assign it? (ETA: not assuming you can answer, just wondering aloud.). If the kids decided, it’s a strange reaction by young children, isn’t it? If the teacher encouraged it, that’s pretty sick.
I’m not going to call it fake right now, since I don’t know much other than that the note exists. But so far, it seems odd.
Keith G
@Maude: The machine must be fed.
Maude
@Keith G:
That’s what I thought.
Maude
@Karen in GA:
The hand printing is steady. Wouldn’t your hands be shaking? Mine would.
It’s well written. During a shooting.
sublime33
Call me highly skeptical, even though it is plausible. My guess that anything found at the school would not be released by law enforcement to the media for days. And it is more doubtful that even if the media was given this that they would release it hours after the tragedy.
JustAnotherBob
@Lurker:
That’s horse shit.
If he can’t bring down a pig with one shot then he needs to let someone else do the shooting. It’s not like trying to hit birds on the wing.
After you shoot the first one you don’t get to aim at any others. They scatter and you spray and pray.
Dieter
@Maude: They will sell it on E-Bay.
You people are getting hysterical.
mai naem
FWIW, I think the language is odd for a child. I am happy and well. “Well” I can’t see a little kid using that word. And even “son.” I can’t see a kid writing “not being a good son.” Maybe “not being good” but “not being a good son.” The writing also doesn’t really looks like a kid. It looks too mature. A kid’s letters are usually written larger and the fact that they aren’t joined would mean that it should be younger child’s writing and yet, the letters are relatively small. Lastly, I would seriously question the judgement of a teacher telling her kids to write a letter while they’re in a freaking closet hiding from a gunman and expecting them to be quiet about it. Not to mention the fact that you’re going to upset them even more.
debbie
@ Lurker:
I was driving home from work on Wednesday night and checking in on talk radio. Hewitt was discussing the Oregon shooting and a caller was complaining how national media was calling the weapon used an assault rifle, when actually it was a sporting rifle. All it did, he said, was give him more of a sporting chance in the hunt.
That is so beside the point. I don’t think people like this can even be reasoned with.
Jon H
For what it’s worth, none of yesterday’s victims was named Brian.
Bfscr
Snopes thinks the letter is unlikely to be authentic to this massacre
http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/newtown.asp