My Life Since the 2012 Sandy Hook Shooting: Sarah Clements’s Story
“People always say, ‘Nothing changed after Sandy Hook.’ And that angers me, because I actually don't think this moment would be happening without the change that happened after Sandy Hook.”
Editor’s Note: This is one in a series of conversations with those who have survived high-profile shootings or lost loved ones to them. The other interviews, as well as background about the series, can be found here.
On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary and turned left, toward the main office and first-grade classrooms; had he turned right, he almost immediately would have encountered Sarah Clements’s mother teaching in her second-grade classroom. This saved her mother’s life, and the lives of her students, and the close call turned both mother and daughter into gun-violence-prevention activists.
That day, 20 children and eight adults, including the shooter and
