The unanswerable questions wrought by gun violence

(CBS News) Friday's awful events in Newtown, Conn., bring back some all-too-familiar questions: "How could this have happened?" and "What can be done?" Here's Martha Teichner:

Somehow, the idea that little children had been shot made it worse.

Elementary schools are supposed to be safe places. So how could 20-year-old Adam Lanza have entered one in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday morning and killed 26 people, and then himself?

And who could comprehend the horror of being summoned to a massacre by text message or robocall, then being told, "Your child is dead"?

Robbie Parker's daughter, Emilie, was one of the 20 dead children. Now, they are no longer anybody's children.

Everybody's children.

We know their names - eight boys, 12 girls. All first graders. And we know that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal, used to dress up in costumes to make her students smile, and that teacher Victoria Soto died sheltering her class.

The details are starting to emerge about Adam Lanza and his mother, Nancy.

Marcia Lanza is Adam Lanza's aunt: "She eventually ended up home schooling him, because she battled with the school district, in what capacity I'm not 100 percent certain," Marcia said of Nancy Lanza. "If it was behavioral, if it was learning disabilities, I don't know. But he was a very bright boy. He was very smart."

Smart but troubled? We've heard that before, and we've watched before. As the story plays out in slow motion, like some endless TV police procedural.

This time with the president playing his part. "We're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of politics," Mr. Obama said.

But what, when? Exactly the same thing has been said every time it's happened. The shootings haven't stopped. And politics has always gotten in the way.

Will Newtown be any different?

It's already been ranked the second worst school shooting in American history. Virginia Tech in 2007 was the worst - 32 people died there.

At Columbine High School in 1999, 13 people were killed, another 2 dozen wounded. But since when have school shootings had their own grisly greatest hits list?

"What we see is patterns of one of these incidents inspiring, if you will, disturbed people who are already thinking about doing something like that to do copycat incidents, or to enhance their own incident to make it worse" said CBS News senior correspondent John Miller.

Can that be stopped?

"Well, there's a series of chicken-and-egg questions there," Miller replied. "Is it the security of the physical premises? Is it the gun laws?"

Adam Lanza's mother, we've learned, was a gun enthusiast. She owned the guns her son used to kill her and the rest of the Newtown victims.

Will this latest incident change any minds about gun control? Probably not, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Before and after the Aurora, Colo., theater shootings in July, attitudes remained virtually unchanged.

A Gallup poll last year showed that support for a ban on handguns has actually gone down, dramatically, over the last 50 years, to a record low of 26 percent.

Now listen to this FBI statistic: On this past "Black Friday" shopping day after Thanksgiving, Miller said, "we hit the all-time record in history for gun sales. Over that three-day period, they sold 283,423 guns in the United States."

And on Thursday, the day before Newtown, the Michigan State Legislature passed a bill that will allow concealed weapons in, among other places, schools. The governor is still deciding whether to sign it.

"Are we headed toward an environment in this country, where we have 'fortress kindergarten'?" asked Teichner.

"We don't need to train kindergartners to throw pencils and backpacks at armed intruders and to have a SWAT team and a metal detector at every door," said Kenneth Trump, President of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland.

"Parents want to know two things," Trump said. "What steps did you have in place to prevent an incident? And how well-prepared were you to respond when a crisis occurs? Many incidents can and have been prevented in school violence, and we've gotten a lot better since Columbine. Unfortunately, there's still going to be those that slip through the cracks."

Adam Lanza, it turns out, broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School.

What will become of the terrified children who ran from the school, and the families of the dead?

For some, not all, the trauma they've experienced could have lasting physical, not just emotional effects.

"There's a couple of studies right now looking at IQ, where kids with trauma have lower IQ than those who don't," said Dr. Glenn Saxe, Chairman of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University Langone Medical Center, and an expert on childhood trauma.

"It's related in a strong way to problems with depression, suicide, obesity, even some cancer rates [and] heart disease," and that's why there's so much attention going to helping people who experience trauma," said Dr. Saxe.

Already, the inevitable shrines have appeared. The vigils have begun. Newtown is wearing its broken heart on its sleeve.

But we've seen this before, too. If only grieving in public could fix things, could end the killings. But in the end, hugs are not enough.