My guess is because the kids who are suffering now are already 'damaged' whereas these kids weren't (or weren't thought to be)… and people tend to get more upset when the victims have everything to lose. These kids had not only great homes, loving parents, and a community, they also had their whole lives ahead of them. Oh yeah, and they come from a predominantly white area with a median income of $90,000/year.
The first survivor video I saw was of an absolutely stunning blue-eyed blonde dealing with emotions that she probably never would have expected she would have had to deal with, but which some ghetto children have learned to live with on pretty much a daily basis.
The cynic in me says that if this had been an elementary school in the ghetto being shot up by crackheads, nobody would have cared… or maybe they would have, but definitely not as much… I guess because you sort of expect it.
It sounds cold, and I'm definitely not downplaying what happened, but I think that people are like that…
Here's an article:
http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/12/the-realty-of-us-violence-epidemic-beyond-sandy-hook.html
Apparently African Americans are far more likely to be victims of violence-- which means this sort of thing has been happening for quite some time now (maybe not all at once, though) and nobody really cared enough to change the laws until rich white kids were murdered. Imagine all of the lives that could have been saved if things like mental health and gun control had been issues when the problems started in the poor neighborhoods!
I'm seriously trying to picture how people would feel if the faces on the news were black instead of white, and I can't… mostly because it makes me uncomfortable, because I feel like I'm confronting my own racism.
The same could be said for Iraq, Afghanistan, any place with a war going on… as far as we've come, we've still got a long way to go.