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2012年12月14日，美國舉國上下沉浸在一篇悲痛的情緒中，在美國康涅狄格州紐敦市的桑迪.胡克小學發(fā)生了一起嚴重的槍擊案，一名20歲的少年持槍闖入桑迪.胡克小學，殺害了包括槍手在內(nèi)的28人，其中20人為兒童，系美國歷史上死傷最慘重的校園槍擊案之一。美國政府和媒體對此事幾位關(guān)注，并在頓短間內(nèi)做出了詳細的報道。下面新東方網(wǎng)雅思頻道從國外網(wǎng)站上收集整理了雅思時事閱讀系列之康涅狄格州校園槍擊案系列報道，供考生們使用，這些文章都是很好的雅思閱讀材料，考生可以先泛讀掌握其大意，再精讀學習其中的詞匯用法，以下為詳細內(nèi)容。
無辜者的大屠殺：康涅狄格州校園槍擊案細節(jié)報道
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?”
