Sandy Hook School Shooting, Newtown, Connecticut: Shooter Dead

Twitter’s got “Sandy Hook” and “Connecticut” as two of the ten top trends as of this writing, and not for a good reason connected to a movie promotion – it’s yet another shooting. This one’s just a few days removed from the Sunday shopping center shooting in Portland, Oregon, and now we have to acknowledge that guns are far too prevalent in our society.

This shooting is at an elementary school. Again: an elementary school. There was either one or two shooters, and two guns, one of them a Glock pistol, was recovered.

Sandy Hood is a K-4 elementary school of 600 kids in Newtown, Connecticut, a town with a population of 27,000 people. The school is on lockdown as this is being blogged and it’s reported that “at least one” of the shooters has been killed, or now it’s said that there was just one shooter. It’s reported that the local hospital took in three patients associated with this tragedy (from Reuters):

Danbury Hospital, located about 11 miles west of the school, had been put on alert for possible casualties, a hospital spokesman told Reuters.

A hospital spokeswoman told NBC Connecticut that the hospital had received three patients from the scene.

Connecticut State Police said its officers were at the scene with local police but provided no additional details. The emergency call to police occurred at 9:41 a.m., state police said.

An individual answering the phone at the Newtown Police Department declined to comment.

Newtown, with a population about 27,000, is in northern Fairfield County, about 45 miles southwest of Hartford and 80 miles northeast of New York City.

Sandy Hook serves children in kindergarten through fourth grade, roughly ages 5 to 10. It is one of four elementary schools in the district. The town also has a grade 5-6 school, a middle school and a high school.