On a very basic and scary level, before our story became a national headline -- a "massacre" -- and before the heated discussions around violent video games and gun violence, it was a very real, vivid, and tragic series of loud, piercing, and fatal moments in time.

As individuals, we are responsible for our choices, especially the choice to kill. But something in our collective heart appears diseased. We cling to guns, it seems, more tightly than we cling to God.

No issue is more integral to us all than the future of America's children, and the opportunities that our society gives them to succeed. The senseless violence affecting children in America today is abhorrent.