(NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
By Mike Lupica
In the middle of the afternoon it is the yellow All-Star Transportation school buses you notice first in Newtown. The buses heading up Church Hill Road and Queen Street and even up Riverside Road toward the firehouse, past Dickinson Drive, which once would have taken you to where Sandy Hook Elementary stood.
Advertisement - story continues below
For the children of Sandy Hook Elementary, there was no need for afternoon buses three years ago, because 20 of the children at that school and six adults had been shot dead in the morning by Adam Lanza, Newtown’s active shooter that day, in a country where active shooters have become as much the face of our country as anybody else.
It is less than two weeks before another Christmas in Newtown, the way it was on the Friday morning when the shooting started on Dec. 14 in 2012. A volunteer fireman in front of Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue plays with a small child in front of the firehouse. In town, the Sandy Hook Diner is closed in the middle of the afternoon. A homeless woman slowly pushes a cart past the sign telling you about the shops and stores of Betts Square.
TRENDING: 'Impeach Barack Obama': Lindsey Graham suggests liberals' worst nightmare
And a couple of miles up the road is the church, St. Rose of Lima, through which all the life and death of this terrible moment in American life — this terrible sign of things to come with mass shootings in America — seemed to pass through exactly three years ago this Monday.
If you come here you always end up stopping at this church, where most of the funerals for the small coffins took place.
Advertisement - story continues below
