title:  ‘Newtown’ Documentary Sheds New Light On Gun Violence In America (VIDEO)
text: Newtown, Connecticut was the site of one of the most horrific mass shootings in United States history at Sandy Hook Elementary School. On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza brutally murdered 20 children in first grade, in addition to six school staff members, before he committed suicide.A new documentary, Newtown, discusses in depth the aftermath and wake the mass shooting left. The film s World Premiere was featured at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, and is continuing along the film festival circuit, with the next screenings scheduled for the Cleveland International Film Festival later this month. Filmed over the course of three years, the documentary features interviews with family members of those who were lost, first responders, and school staff members, as the event changed the course of all their lives forever.Despite the incitement caused by the tragedy in Newtown for government legislators to make policy changes which would help prevent future Adam Lanzas from committing similar horrible crimes, those calls fell on deaf ears in Congress. Instead, mass shootings continue to occur across the United States, while no action is taken to decrease their frequencies. Instead, states like Texas, West Virginia, Florida, and most other states in the country allow open carry guns without any sort of special permit. As calls for gun control increased from the public, the NRA and their lobbyists have reacted by pushing for gun ownership to become the norm.In a July 2015 interview, President Barack Obama told the BBC,  The one area that I feel I ve been most frustrated and most stymied is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient, common sense gun safety laws, even in the sense of repeated mass killings. Featured image via Flickr