One more
A father dedicated to helping prevent mass shootings after his daughter was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre has died of an apparent suicide.
The body of Jeremy Richman was found in his Connecticut office building Monday morning, Newtown police said.
His death is the third suicide in the past week related to school massacres.
Richman, 49, was the father of 6-year-old Avielle Richman, who was among 20 children and six adults killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
You know…Sandy Hook was the one and only time Obama asked Michelle to come back to the White House from an engagement because he couldn’t deal.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, Richman tried to help make sure shootings like the one that killed his daughter wouldn’t happen again.
The neuroscientist co-founded the The Avielle Foundation, which calls attention to mental health issues through research and community engagement.
“The Avielle Foundation’s mission is two-sided. On the one side we have research. We are funding neuroscience research aimed at understanding the brain’s chemistry, structure, and circuits that lead to violence and compassion,” the foundation’s website states.
The other side is “focused on community education and engagement.”
It’s a strange and sad and puzzling thing that the US is so big on violence and so weak on compassion.
I was talking to my husband about that dichotomy just yesterday. I told him I wished we could totally do away with the phrase “never apologize” – but as long as John Wayne is revered as the symbol of manhood, and toxic masculinity is being taught as normal, we’ll see these things happening.
And women, often thought to be so naturally nurturing, also often turn out to have little compassion and a desire to get “revenge” on people just for being different. Perhaps not naturally nurturing after all?
I don’t even think we have to get all the way to empathy if we could just get people toward some level of sympathy and compassion; that could help make the world better a lot faster than millions of MAGA hats.