On December 14th, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut witnessed the second-deadliest school shooting in our country's history; twenty innocent elementary school children and six brave teachers and administrators were fatally shot and killed. Considering the gravity of what took place just last week, I cannot do this issue justice in a mere note on the Internet, but I can share with you several of the emotions and thought-processes I grappled with upon receiving the horrendous news.

	Sadness, an abject sorrow that tears your world apart, is always the first to strike. After hearing of the disaster for the first time, I remember meekly making my way through the halls of the great Horace Mann School in a confused state of pity, revulsion, and agonizing pain. It could have been me, or my siblings, or my friends, or my classmates. It wasn't this time, but honestly, who knows about next.

	Next came a wave of blinding, empowering anger coupled with a desperate need for answers. Especially when discussing the tragedy on social media and in routine conversation, I naturally made my rounds through the blame game as my soul tried to comprehend how the world could have suddenly turned its back on me and the rest of humanity. Another part of me acted up and frantically looked for a way to undoubtably prevent something like this from ever happening again. And to think, they were only children...

	At this point, I personally turned to pressing national concerns including gun control laws, mental health procedures, and even the role of the media in my overly-ambitious  quest to fully understand what had unfolded before me. Even our own school's vital security procedures began to concern me as my self preservationist instincts kicked in. Unfortunately, no new set of laws or forward-looking political statements could adequately resolve the intensely personal questions that faced me—at the risk of sound brash, these conversations about future action almost felt like coping mechanisms.

	But what is just now beginning to occur to me is a more profound explanation as to why this tragedy touched me so deeply: it forced me to look straight into the eyes of ever-certain Death, confront it in all my glorious vulnerability, and accept the inherent inequity of its ways. As is the regrettable state of the human condition, these horrifying facts of life—of death, evil, and disparity—represent for me, at least partially, what it means to be human. Twenty-six dutiful and innocent members of the Sandy Hook Elementary School died for simply being at the wrong place at the wronge time; we can still recount inspiring stories of their final acts of courage and heroism.

	Our most accurate estimates hypothesize that approximately 153,000 people perish from this earth every single day. Let me be perfectly clear, I have neither sufficient experience with death nor the ability to wrap my head around the gravity of 153,000 deaths to truly understand what this statistic means. Yet strictly mathematically speaking, we discover that the equivalent of nearly 6,000 Newtown shootings occur every day on this planet. Even sharpening our focus to the United States, only about 0.7% of total deaths are caused by homicide.

	Now this is not to be misconstrued as my diminishing the severity and magnitude of the Newtown shooting—rarely do we encounter acts of such unadulterated evil. Instead when I read these statistics, my heart, thoughts, and prayers go out to those who lost loved ones not only in Newtown, but also in cities, towns, and communities all over the world. As hapless teenagers and generally sheltered individuals, we go through life unfettered and unintimidated by our inevitable fates. To add to that, a deep-seeded, noble longing for absolute equality is a hallmark of the collective Horace Mann psyche. Through this lens, it becomes abudnantly clear why just last Friday, our worlds were turned completely upside-down.

	And so I ask myself, who do I turn to to eradicate this subdued but incessant pain? We would love for our families, friends, religions, or even governments to provide us comfort and absolute certainty through these difficult times, but unfortunately, we must come to terms with the fact that we are ultimately alone, shockingly inequipped to deal with such fundimental, impossible questions.

by Mohit Mookim in Englewood Cliffs