Texas School Shooting Brings Back Memories of Sandy Hook Massacre

Less than a week after a mass shooting in Buffalo, 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed by an 18-year-old gunman in a Texas elementary school – a massacre that is being called the worst school shooting since Sandy Hook nearly a decade ago.

Across the nation, people barely had time to process the massacre in a Buffalo supermarket in which a 20-year-old shot and killed 10 people.

For Connecticut residents, Tuesday’s shooting brings back memories of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 students and one teacher were killed by an 18-year-old gunman.

While the collective grief of a nation is bad enough, with shooting after shooting occurring before there is even time to process them, Connecticut residents are reliving the horrible day at Sandy Hook through images of a similar rampage, nearly a decade later and 2,000 miles away in Uvalde, Texas.

“It hurts, it’s hurt upon hurt, pain upon pain, grief upon grief, it’s almost hard to find ways to articulate how much it hurts,” said Javeed Sukhera, MD, PhD, FRCP, Hartford HealthCare Behavioral Network’s Institute of Living psychiatrist-in-chief and Hartford Hospital chair of psychiatry. “Some people are going to shut down, some people are going to start going into hyper drive, going through the motions even quicker, because there’s no one size fits all when it comes to coping. It’s deep, it’s raw, and even if we think it’s not there it’s going to affect us in some way, shape or form.”

Read more about how to talk to young children about this tragedy or at what age it is appropriate to discuss it with them on the Hartford HealthCare Health News Hub.