They had a distance that has disappeared. A distance that helped them keep the rarity and unpredictability of the tragedy in perspective, granting them parental peace.
The other side of the coin - how this very distance can be put to a sickening use with drone strikes.
As Monbiot observed: "there can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people" in Newtown. The exact opposite is true for the children and their families continuously killed in the Muslim world by the US government: huge numbers of people, particularly in the countries responsible, remain completely untouched by the grief that is caused in those places. That is by design - to ensure that opposition is muted - and it is brutally effective.
By sickening use do you mean more pinpoint attacks that kill fewer people than conventional means?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.