Sandy Hook a year later: Our hopeless gun debate

Each side is too quick to demonize the other

Sandy Hook
(Image credit: (Spencer Platt/Getty Images))

This is where things stand. Twenty sets of parents and six other families in Newtown, Conn., on Saturday will mark the first anniversary of the unspeakable. For them, nothing has changed in the past year. Four seasons have come, four seasons have gone. The tears still flow, and grief that only a parent robbed of life's most precious gift — a child — can know has not diminished, and never will.

This is also where things stand: It has been, by most measures, a very good year for supporters of gun rights, and a year of dashed hopes and disillusionment for those who favor greater restrictions on guns. The PBS program Frontline notes that in 2013:

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Paul Brandus

An award-winning member of the White House press corps, Paul Brandus founded WestWingReports.com (@WestWingReport) and provides reports for media outlets around the United States and overseas. His career spans network television, Wall Street, and several years as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union for NBC Radio and the award-winning business and economics program Marketplace. He has traveled to 53 countries on five continents and has reported from, among other places, Iraq, Chechnya, China, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.