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2012年12月14日，美国举国上下沉浸在一篇悲痛的情绪中，在美国康涅狄格州纽敦市的桑迪.胡克小学发生了一起严重的枪击案，一名20岁的少年持枪闯入桑迪.胡克小学，杀害了包括枪手在内的28人，其中20人为儿童，系美国历史上死伤最惨重的校园枪击案之一。美国政府和媒体对此事几位关注，并在顿短间内做出了详细的报道。下面新东方网雅思频道从国外网站上收集整理了雅思时事阅读系列之康涅狄格州校园枪击案系列报道，供考生们使用，这些文章都是很好的雅思阅读材料，考生可以先泛读掌握其大意，再精读学习其中的词汇用法，以下为详细内容。
无辜者的大屠杀：康涅狄格州校园枪击案细节报道
Massacre of the Innocents: Chilling Details About the Gunman in the Schoolhouse
(From: TIME, Auther: Olivia B. Waxman, Date: Dec. 14, 2012)
Barbara Sibley was being a good mom—but she did not know she would have to walk into hell to prove it. Her eight-year old had left something at home and so she drove over to the Sandy Hook School to deliver it. But something was odd about the compound when she got there at around 9:30. “It’s an elementary school,” she recalls to TIME. “There are usually kids outside or something. It was very quiet.”
She ran into another mom at the front entrance, where visitors had to be buzzed in. That’s when it became clear something was amiss: the window next to the door had been shattered. “There was glass everywhere,” she says. “And that’s when we heard gunfire.”
The school, in the well-to-do town of Newtown in Connecticut (median income $111,506), had become the stage for the latest manifestation of American civic terror: the sudden appearance of a heavily armed assailant bent on mass murder. The setting was perverse: Newtown reported only one violent crime in 2010 and was considered one of the more attractive places in the country to raise a family. By the end of the onslaught, as many as 20 families would be bereft of their children—and the nation, led by a mournful and teary President Obama, would once again be confronted with the issue of guns in a free society.
The instant Sibley heard the gunfire, she ran for cover, sprinting across the parking lot to where dumpsters stood, hiding there while the carnage took place. Within the school, the gunman was stalking the halls. Rebecca Cox related to TIME what her mother, Sarah Cox, the school nurse, saw: “She heard a loud popping sound, so she got under her desk in her nurse’s office. She did see the gunman’s feet. He walked into her office. She saw his legs and the bottom of his feet and just held her breath. He didn’t know she was there and then he turned around and walked out.” Sibley would later be told that students could hear what was going on over the PA system as one two-section class seemed to take the brunt of the invasion. “All of the kids heard everything going on,” she says. “They heard the gunshots. They heard the cries for help. The whole school heard it.”
When sirens blared in the background, Sibley knew help was on the way. Firetrucks from the station down the block pulled up and, when the authorities gave a signal to Sibley and the other moms hiding out with her, the women ran, keeping low, to a shielding fire truck as an officer covered them with his weapon. About 10 or 15 minutes later, authorities started to release students one class at a time. She saw her child and went down to the fire house to await instructions and head counts. And that was when the horror became apparent—not with visible carnage but by absence. “It was apparent,” says Sibley, “that there was one particular class of students that was not coming out of the building.” She says, “Those parents were just devastated and hysterical, and it was awful.” In the street outside the firehouse, which was bedecked with wreaths and Christmas trees, one woman collapsed into another woman’s arms, screaming “Oh my God. Why did they take my baby?”
