Banfield reflects on Sandy Hook amid ‘identical’ Texas shooting

(NewsNation) — NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield gave an emotional reaction to the deadly Robb Elementary School shooting.

“What I’m seeing on the screen right now is extraordinarily reminiscent of what I saw in 2012 (at Sandy Hook Elementary School). It’s identical,” Banfield said during an appearance on NewsNation’s “Rush Hour.”

“This is a playbook now that we can all follow. You’ll get aerial shots of law enforcement officers outside the elementary school, as they start to process the dead. The bodies are still in there, Nicole, those children’s bodies are still in there. And they will be there for quite some time as those law enforcement officers start dropping little orange cones, all over that building where they find bullets, and evidence, and fragments, and body parts of babies. We went through this in 2012.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy made an impassioned plea for change on the Senate floor.

“What are we doing? Days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands,” Murphy, a Democrat, said.

Banfield lives just 40 minutes from Sandy Hook in Connecticut and was reporting live in New York City when the Sandy Hook news broke.

“The emotion that you saw from Chris Murphy is real. It is felt by all of us, not just in the press who were there, not just the senators who represent. It is felt by everyone in America, who had to stomach the fact that little children were blown to bits in their classroom, one after the other by a teenager,” Banfield added.