The night after Sandy Hook, a gunman pulled behind a car in Kansas City’s east side and opened fire, striking 4-year-old Aydan Perea in the head. The boy had just gotten into his father’s car.

‘He was innocent and he was just lifeless,’ said the first bystander to reach Aydan. ‘All my life I’ve never seen nothing so devastating. I’m unable to eat, I’m unable to sleep because I see this baby in my head.”

It was not the pre-schooler’s first brush with gun violence. A year earlier, a gunman fired a shotgun at the house where Aydan had been staying. No one was injured, but bullets shattered a front window and riddled a parked car. This week, days after the drive-by shooting, doctors declared the boy brain dead.

Aydan’s mother said her world has “stopped.”

In the week following the Sandy Hook massacre, a body was found inside a vacant house, at a car wash, in a bodega. They were discovered on a bike trail, in a backyard, inside the front office of a motel, in an idling Chevy pickup. They were the 67th murder in their city and the 88th and the 124th.

All had one thing in common: the murder weapon. All died from gunshots. Shots to the head. Multiples to the chest. And so on.

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