On Friday afternoon, I heard an expert on the psychology of mass murderers like Adam Lanza interviewed on the Mark Levin radio show. John Lot said shooters like Lanza are bent on committing suicide. What distinguishes them from other suicides is their grandiosity — they want to go out in a blaze, taking as many innocent lives with them as they can, because they want to make a name for themselves, albeit in the most perverse way. But their names will be emblazoned in the media and in our consciousness nevertheless.
We need to stop finding excuses — Lanza had Asperger Syndrome! — to minimize their deeds. We need to call these mass murderers what they are: EVIL.
But sure enough, evil men like Adam Lanza do succeed in their malignant quest for publicity. What these evil men do is so unthinkably horrible, we can’t help but want to find out who they are. Who is Adam Lanza? Why did he kill 26 innocent lives in Sandy Hook Elementary School, including 20 first-grade little children whose lives had barely begun? What rage can possibly account for him shooting all his victims execution-style and shooting each precious 6-year-old child ELEVEN times?
The way we can thwart these evil bastards from the publicity they seek is to focus on the Good and the Light.
Here are examples of the Good and the Light, in the midst of great evil that terrible day in Newtown, Connecticut.
Daniel Bates reports for the Daily Mail, Dec. 14, 2012, that during the shooting at Sandy Hook, music teacher Maryrose Kristopik had the presence of mind to gather her students, ages 8-10, into a closet. She kept the children quiet by praying with them and assuring them “I love you,” and so saved 20 precious lives.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, Kristopik said she barricaded herself into a closet with her students while killer Adam Lanza battered on the door screaming: “Let me in! Let me in!” Only when the shots, which had been ringing out, had died down did she lead her students outside to safety.
Mrs Kristopik said: “I did take the children into the closet and talked with them to keep them quiet. I told them that I loved them. I said there was a bad person in the school. I didn’t want to tell them anything past that.”
Kristopik said there were 20 kids in the closet and there wasn’t enough space for them. One door had several instruments, including big xylophones, blocking it. But Kristopik stood in front of the other door and held the handle to keep the children out of harm’s way.
She said, “I was just trying to be as strong as possible. I was thinking about the children. I told them that we had to keep quiet and we were hiding and nobody knew we were there. Of course I was afraid too. I wanted them to be quiet, I thought it was a pretty secure out of the way place.”
Maryrose Kristopik rightly is hailed a “hero” by parents.
An unnamed mother, in her 40s, whose nine-year-old son was among the children said: “I want to thank her. She saved their lives. The shooter kept banging on the door screaming: ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ but he didn’t get in. Now I have to explain to my nine-year-old son that his friends won’t be coming back. How am I supposed to do that?”
Brenda Lebinski said her eight-year-old daughter is safe thanks to the teacher’s decision to move all kids into a closet when Lanza had entered the building. “My daughter’s teacher is my hero,” Lebinski said. “She locked all the kids in a closet and that saved their lives.”
Asked about the incident itself, Mrs Kristopik denied that she was a hero: “I called the police, I dialed 911 and they said they had reports of shots in the school, so that’s when I had to tell the kids there was a bad person there because I didn’t want them to talk. I did what any other teacher would have done and I know there were others like me doing the same. They were doing whatever they could. They were my fourth graders. We held hands, we hugged and I just tried to talk to them a little. We also said some prayers and one of the children said we should say a prayer, and we did.”
There were other heroes at Sandy Hook.
One of them is the school’s principal Dawn Hochsprung, who reportedly tried to shield students from Lanza with her body before she was gunned down.
Another hero teacher was Kaitlin Roig, who barricaded her first grade students in the classroom’s bathroom and locked the door when she first heard gunshots.
Roig said, “The kids were being so good. They asked ‘Can we go see if anyone is out there?’, ‘I just want Christmas”, ‘I don’t want to die, I just want to have Christmas.’ I said, ‘You’re going to have Christmas and Hanukkah… I tried to be positive’.”
Another teacher (name unknown), according to Richard Wilford’s seven-year-old son, went out of the second-grade classroom to check on the (gun) noise, came back in, locked the door and had the kids huddle up in the corner until police arrived. “There’s no words,” Wilford said. “It’s sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him.”
Melissa Makris’s 10-year-old son, Philip, was in the school gym and “heard a lot of loud noises and then screaming.” His gym teachers immediately gathered the children and kept them safe in a corner. The students stayed huddled until police came in the gym and helped them get out of the building, telling the kids to run.
God bless all these wonderful teachers — candles in the darkness — who, as Hell broke loose and unleashed its demons, had the courage and presence of mind to secure the safety of their little charges.
~Eowyn
