Karl Gehring/The Denver Post, via Associated PressPeople gathered outside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on Friday.
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Updated | July 23, 2012

If you woke up to the news of the shootings at a movie theater in the Denver suburb of Aurora on Friday morning and want to address the events with children, at school or at home, here are some suggestions.

We will continue to update this post, and we invite you to contribute thoughts and ideas as well.

Talking About Sensitive Issues With Children: Last year we published a guest post, 10 Ways to Talk to Students About Sensitive Issues in the News,that suggests ways to be responsive to feelings and values and promote dialogue about a topic like this one.

Write About Reactions: In a classroom setting, one of the easiest ways to start is to ask students to write about their reactions. When they are finished, you might invite volunteers to read to the whole class, or have students form pairs or small groups to read excerpts to each other first. Or, ask the class to whip around the room, reading “as much as a line, as little as a word” from their responses.

If you think it is appropriate to continue the discussion from there, you might ask students questions like, How did you feel when you heard about the shootings? How do you react to news about violence in public places in general? What do you think might cause a person to perpetrate such an act? What other connections do you make to this story? What issues does it raise for you?

Following the News: As more news about this event develops, invite students to read the coverage, view photographs and maps, and take notes. You might use graphic organizers like our One-Pager, our Connecting The New York Times to Your World or another organizer to guide response.

Campaigning During a Sad National Event: Is it O.K. to continue campaigning in the middle of an event of this nature, and if so, how does that change the message? That is the challenge for both President Obama and Mitt Romney, according to this article. (Update: President Obama has cut short a campaign trip, and both the president’s and Mr. Romney’s campaigns pulled their ads from Colorado TV stations on Friday.)

How should they respond? “It falls to a president at times like these to not only pull the country together in its grief but to try to explain and make sense of something so senseless,” writes Peter Baker in the piece. What do we need from leaders when events like this happen? Why? What leaders in the past have responded well to national challenges, and what could we learn from them? (Update: Here are President Obama’s remarks, made Friday morning. On Sunday, the president came to Aurora to meet with survivors.)

Gun Rights and Gun Control: Events like this inevitably lead to debates about gun laws and gun control.

In “Colorado Gun Laws Remain Lax, Despite Some Changes,” John Schwartz reports on gun laws in that state post-Columbine, writing:

James E. Holmes, 24, the former neuroscience student believed to be the lone gunman in Friday’s shootings in Aurora, armed himself with an assault rifle, a shotgun and a handgun to allegedly kill 12 and wound 59 others, many critically. All were weapons that would probably be legal for him to possess.

In “Suspect Bought Large Stockpile of Rounds Online,” reporter Jack Healy writes that buying 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun online was “pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon.”

Will this shooting shift the national debate over guns? Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins writes, “Lately, even the most terrible gun tragedies fail to make a political dent” and examines why. In “Mourning and Mulling,” Op-Ed columnist Charles Blow, who writes that he comes from a gun culture, looks at a Gallup poll that shows little national appetite for stricter gun laws, but ends his column with, “We simply have to take some reasonable steps toward making sure that all our citizens are kept safer — those with guns and those without. We can’t keep digging graves where common ground should be.” Do you agree? Why or why not?

This April, with the Trayvon Martin case, a school shooting in Ohio and the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway all in the news, we published Second Amendment and Beyond: Pondering Gun Rights, Laws and Culture, a collection of lesson ideas and links to help students think about the issues, debate them, consider their history, and create personal projects on the topic.

A Predictable Cycle? In the 24 hours following the shooting, many wrote about how Americans have become used to these all-too-frequent tragediesand the cycle of debate and blame that will follow. “Nothing changes,” writesAdam Gopnik in The New Yorker. “It will happen again.” (The satirical newspaper The Onion also echoed this idea.)

In a Times Op-Ed piece, “We’ve Seen This Movie Before,” Roger Ebert writes:

Should this young man — whose nature was apparently so obvious to his mother that, when a ABC News reporter called, she said “You have the right person” — have been able to buy guns, ammunition and explosives? The gun lobby will say yes. And the endless gun control debate will begin again, and the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association will go to work, and the op-ed thinkers will have their usual thoughts, and the right wing will issue alarms, and nothing will change. And there will be another mass murder.

Do you agree? Will “nothing change?” Have we “seen this movie before”? What, in your opinion, could change this cycle? What do you think of Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins’s statement that, as with women’s suffrage in the early 1900’s and civil rights activism in the 1950’s, “nothing will change unless the people decide to do the leading”? How do you think that could happen?

‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and Hollywood’s Response: How has the movie industry handled this “act of real-life violence”? What impact will the shooting have on Warner Brothers Pictures’s marketing and promotional plans, now that its summer blockbuster has been linked to a tragedy?

Will you see this film? Christopher Nolan, the movie’s director, issued a statement in which he called the killings “appalling.” He added, “The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.” Does this event change the way you feel about the experience of seeing a movie in a theater? Why or why not?

The Killer: What is known about the shooter? What is unknown? In an Opinion piece, Dave Cullen, one of the first wave of reporters after the Columbine shootings in 1999, writes “Don’t Jump to Conclusions About the Killer.” He cautions:

Over the next several days, you will be hit with all sorts of evidence fragments suggesting one motive or another. Don’t believe any one detail. Mr. Holmes has already been described as a loner. Proceed with caution on that. Nearly every shooter gets tagged with that label, because the public is convinced that that’s the profile, and people barely acquainted with the gunman parrot it back to every journalist they encounter. The Secret Service report determined that it’s usually not true.

Resist the temptation to extrapolate details prematurely into a whole…The killer is rarely who he seems.

As you read accounts in coming days, weigh Mr. Cullen’s words: “Perpetrators of mass murder are usually nothing like our conceptions of them. They are nothing like a vision of pure evil. They are complicated.” Do you agree with this assessment? What is “complicated” about James E. Holmes?

Ideas From the Arizona Shootings: When Gabrielle Giffords was shot, in January 2010, we published Ways to Teach About the Arizona Shootings. Here are some suggestions from that post that may be appropriate in responding to this news as well:

• Profile the Victims: Students create a collage or bulletin board profile of the victims of the attack. You might model the profiles on one of the following Times features: the annual Times Magazine feature The Lives They Lived or the Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. How can the victims’ lives be recognized, honored and celebrated? Brainstorm ways you may be able to offer condolences to the families of the victims or do a related service learning project that grows out of students’ thoughts and feelings about these events and the victims’ lives.

  Update: Learn more about the victims of this shooting via this interactiveand a related article.

• Take Multiple Perspectives: Re-purpose our lesson Creating Compassionate Communities, about police brutality, to focus on this shooting. The lesson invites students to reflect on their own experiences with loss, consider the multiple constituencies that are affected by such an event and then write about the event from multiple perspectives. In their writing, students might choose to examine how heroism often emerges from sad events of this kind.

Memories of Columbine: For some, this shooting immediately prompted memories of the Columbine shootings in Colorado in 1999. Our lesson plan from that year, Taking Aim at Violence in Schools, used the original Times article about the event to suggest ideas, like a student round-table discussion, that might be helpful in responding to this news as well.

… and Virginia Tech: Our 2007 lesson, Campus Catastrophe , about the shootings at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, also suggests ideas for discussion, writing, research and more.