Newtown, Conn. — In the painful months since the Sandy Hook schoolhouse massacre, parents in this grieving town have found themselves asking each other a common but awkward question when they drop off their kids for play dates and sleepovers.
“Do you have a gun in the house?”
“When you go to someone’s home, you know if they have a dog or smoke,” said Helen Brickfield, the mother of two Newtown teenagers. “That’s obvious. But you would not know if they had guns and if the guns were safely stored.”
Brickfield admits that some of the other parents were offended when she first started asking the question.
But with news surfacing yesterday that gunman Adam Lanza and his law-abiding mother had enough weapons in their well-manicured house to arm a small brigade, the question doesn’t seem so unreasonable.
A neighbor who lives a few doors away from the Lanza house said her son used to play in the home as a child with Adam’s older brother. This parent said she was mortified to learn that Nancy Lanza had more guns in her home than pots and pans.
“Here she was, in my mind, a responsible citizen,” the neighbor said.
“A law-abiding citizen thinks she’s doing the right thing by buying these weapons and using them to bond with her son.
“She was horribly, horribly mistaken.”
Parent Darren Wagner said he didn’t like having to ask the question, but in the wake of the shooting, that’s the new price of being a responsible father.
”I’m not trying to pass judgment,” said Wagner, who has two teenage sons.
No one yet has told him yes.
“But they’re surprised. You can see the wheels spinning in their heads. ‘Maybe I should be asking the same thing.’ I hope it catches on.”