(Editor's Note: This essay appeared in the Sunday print edition of the Daily News)
In my extended family, Christmas always comes a bit early — it's easier to get everyone together on one day and in one spot — which means that in a few hours, I'll be driving to Wilton, Conn., to spend time with my nieces and nephews. It seems a bittersweet thing, today, to be driving from New York City to Connecticut, the state where I grew up, to celebrate the holiday with a happy and thriving brood, only 20 miles from the horror of Newtown, site of Friday's heart-rending massacre.
And already I wonder: How do I talk to my nieces and nephews about what happened?
Connecticut has done nothing to deserve its infamy. My state is often a state you drive through on the way to more powerful neighbors elsewhere, unassuming, hard-working, undramatic. It is densely populated, relatively speaking, but for all of its density it is not so dangerous, even in its somewhat rundown and struggling cities.
When headline-grabbing violence happens in Connecticut, as it did, for example, in Cheshire in 2007, when most of the Petit family was murdered by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, there's a baffling, unthinkable aspect to the eruption of this violence.
But eventually it is bound to be Connecticut's turn. The mathematics of horror dictates that eventually every state in the United States of America gets its grim, ignoble turn as the site of mass murder.
The children of Sandy Hook Elementary make the pain of Newtown unbearably painful. As President Obama so movingly demonstrated in his remarks Friday, it's the pain of futures uninhabited. The scale of those unfulfilled futures is almost too much to contemplate: the baseball unplayed, the musical instruments unexplored, the high school dramas unperformed, the college applications unwritten.
We know adult life to be difficult, challenging, sometimes sad, and we expect the parade of troubled adults to march through our lives.
On a day like this there are voices raised in abundance on the subject of gun control, and their point is undeniable. Others say the answer lies in better treatment of mental health, and again the evidence to support this argument is compelling. And yet there are other answers that are both bigger and smaller than these ideas: inside each one of our communities, inside each one of us.
In some ways, I understand all the players in this sad, dark morality play. I was a child in a Connecticut elementary school, and I was also a troubled adolescent and young adult of the state. My parents divorced in Connecticut when I was nine, and I traveled back and forth between them in Fairfield County. I was smart, but socially awkward and somewhat isolated.
There is a history of alcoholism and depression in my family, with threats of suicide not unknown, and as I grew up I suffered with both of these illnesses - alcoholism and depression — and was hospitalized in my twenties. And, not to put too fine a point on it, in my family there are guns. I grew up around guns, and while I didn't take to them myself and have not fired one in more than 30 years, my childhood was filled with hunting and the lore and ritual of the shotgun.
On paper, then, I could well have been the kind of Connecticut youth of whom you might have been suspicious, though I now recoil from the tragic turn of events just as much as any thinking, feeling person.
What did Connecticut do in my case to blunt the pain and rage and to help me grow up right in the hard years of adolescence and young adulthood? Maybe the empire of contemporary political chatter is right about one thing: It does begin and end with family, with the love and intervention of family. I am not arguing in favor of a traditional family, at all — it was often my step-parents and family friends who seemed to listen to me best, when I was unable to listen to my own parents. But that sense of a scaffolding, of adults around who might lend an ear, meant a lot on many a dark night.
And then there is school itself. The love of learning gave me a lot of purpose, especially in the area of reading. Reading Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Whitman in my teens in Connecticut not only kept me home by the hearth, but it also taught me something about how lucky I was to live in an upper-middle class family in one of the most affluent states in the country.
I remember being profiled by a newspaper once, on the occasion of the publication of my Connecticut novel, "The Ice Storm," and for this profile going back to New Canaan, where that novel is set, and setting foot in what is now called Saxe Middle School, the scene of some of my hardest years in adolescence.
A lot had changed in the world between 1975, when I left Saxe, and 1995, when the epidemic of school-related gun violence was well underway. In the 70s, of course, if you entered a school premises, there was a presumption that you had business there.
That said, with a reporter at my side, I did get a brief chance to talk to Mr. Campbell, social studies teacher and soccer coach. He was young and idealistic in 1974, when I first studied with him and was no less idealistic 20 years later. Incredibly, without any prodding, Mr. Campbell brought up the schoolyard shootings that day, saying to me that people were dying because of kids who felt outcast and alone.
Maybe so, maybe some people are so lost that the whirlwind of loss takes them places where no one should go. Or maybe some people lose the capacity to feel the sense of community that prevents sociopathy.
We may never know exactly what turned the Newtown shooter from a troubled youth to a murderer on an incalculable scale. And yet at every turn there should have been resources that could have made the biggest difference.
For me, a big part of it was Mr. Campbell and his fellow teachers at Saxe, who did part of the good that was done for me.
And when family and community fail, there is still the redemption of friends. Kids looking after their fellows. In my middle teens, when I went away to school for a few years, when I was away from my parents, it was my schoolmates who kept me from doing myself harm on occasion. They loved me and appreciated me when I wasn't able to love myself, and I probably only got through high school because of them.
That doesn't mean that better mental health treatment in the United States of America would be a bad thing. If we're all honest about it, we know that the problem with mental health treatment is an insurance problem. No insurance company wants to pay for the complicated treatment and frequent hospitalization of paranoid schizophrenics. And so the families of schizophrenics become the first line of defense. And the same is true of sociopathy, whose symptoms are more ambiguous and harder to define and where intervention is, at best, extremely difficult.
Likewise, it's true that more vigorous gun control would not hurt. In Japan, where gun ownership is restricted, there are virtually no gun-related homicides at all, and thus no schoolyard massacres. As my brother, of Wilton, Conn., said when I talked to him yesterday about this: "Melt all the guns."
My own daughter goes to day care in downtown Manhattan, and I have to through a metal detector every time I take her there. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Do I regret that metal detector? Not even once have I regretted it.
Is better mental health care or gun control the right prescription for a nation beset by more mass murder than any country on earth, civilized or otherwise? I do not know. But I know that if there is a chance that any approach is the right approach, we ought to pursue it.
At the heart of any attempt to inhibit further violence, however, should be an incredibly simple idea about how to keep our wayward sons of America from straying into the provinces of what Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy rightly calls evil: practicing love and vigilance. Hundreds of millions of guns are already out there, and there is a Second Amendment to our constitution that is unlikely to be profoundly reinterpreted any time soon.
But we can balance all that lethal firepower with a little more love and caring. The Christmas season demands it, and all the other seasons besides.
Moody is author of "The Ice Storm" and other books.
Photos: (Getty; AP; Getty)
