Voices: Still haunted by gun violence

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Maybe it's because I grew up in New York, a city that seemed to have one tragic headline after another, day after day, in the local tabloids.

For decades, the magnitude of gun violence throughout the country didn't register. I would quickly turn the newspaper page to move past a story about a shooting or hit the remote to switch to another channel when fatal bullets were fired.

Now, though, every shooting — no matter where it happens in America — registers immediately.

Even talk or legislation about gun control and gun rights — such as the law signed Wednesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal allowing licensed guns in bars, schools, churches and some government buildings — instantly captures my attention. And it makes me wonder when the bloodshed will cease.

My mind-set changed on the morning of Dec. 14, 2012.

Twenty-seven people, including 20 young children, lay dead from a single shooter, who then fired a gun to kill himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where I live.

A friend from Vancouver, British Columbia, called and asked, "What's going on in your country?"

He wanted to know why so many Americans were dying in a hail of bullets, and I didn't have an answer.

I could only tell him I rushed that December morning to the horrific, chaotic scene, a place I knew best from coaching youth basketball in the school gymnasium and youth baseball on the field outside.

I saw lots of scared people, and parents who didn't know where their children were. Later, I would come to the terrible realization that those parents were the ones who had lost their precious children.

My friends are friends of those parents, my friends are educators and parents of children who hid in closets during the shooting spree. I knew the shooter's mother, the first one killed. Knowing all those people, though, didn't explain to me why Newtown is one of many beautiful American towns and cities that have been ravaged by gun violence.

A warm, close-knit town was devastated that day. It's still struggling to find its way. And it winces now and feels the pain every time gun violence erupts.

We felt the horror of Overland Park, Kansas, this month when a shotgun-wielding man opened fire at two Jewish sites, killing three people.

We felt the horror of Fort Hood in Texas a few weeks before when a gunman killing three people there and injured 16 others.

We felt the horror of the fatal shooting of a student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., in December, and the shooting rampage that killed 12 at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., in September.

And those are just a few of the many senseless acts of gun violence that keep resonating through Newtown.

I still have no answers for my Canadian friend. The bullets keep flying, the body count gets higher and higher, and community after community gets torn apart, left with enduring grief and haunted by memories it doesn't want.

Stoller lives in Newtown, Conn., and is USA TODAY's investigative travel editor.