“HE WAS killed minutes after drop-off. He had been happy and excited. He was invited to a pool birthday party the following day, and he couldn’t wait for Saturday to arrive. Only he never lived another Saturday.

“The next time any of us saw him, he was lying in a casket at a funeral home, his face untouched, still perfect, as though he were sleeping. He looked like he might wake up. But of course he didn’t.”

Marie-Claude Duytschaever still remembers the day when her six-year-old grandson, Noah, was gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary school. This year’s anniversary, three years to the day, is particularly difficult, given the shocking figures coming out of the US.

A staggering 554 children under the age of 12 have died from a gun, both intentional and accidental, since a bloodthirsty Adam Lanza stormed the school at Sandy Hook and fired 154 shots from his Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle, killing 20 children and six staff members, according to an NBC News analysis,

At that rate, a child is shot dead every two days in the United States. And since Sandy Hook, little has changed.

In fact, American children are nine times more likely to die in gun incidents than children anywhere else in the developed world. According toEvery Town for Gun Safety, “a third of American children live in homes with firearms, and of these households, 43 per cent contain at least one unlocked firearm.

“Thirteen per cent of households with guns contain at least one firearm that is unlocked and loaded or stored with ammunition.

“In all, more than two million American children live in homes with unsecured guns — and 1.7 million live in homes with guns that are both loaded and unlocked.”

In the time since Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association has successfully stalled numerous attempts to change America’s murky and muddled gun laws and, in some cases, even repealed existing laws.

Let’s not forget the shocking response by the NRA after the school massacre: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA’s executive vice president.

Most recently, the US Senate failed to introduce The background check amendment; which would have seen expanded measures on background checks and barred those on the terrorist watch list from purchasing a gun.

The amendment was similar to legislation that the Senate voted down in 2013 after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

The vote was lost just one day after the holiday massacre in San Bernardino earlier this month.

“The time for prayers, thoughts and sympathies is now, but it is also a time to act,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer said prior to the vote.

“This country is dangerously close to falling into a new normal where mass shootings of children, of healthcare workers, of mums and dads, brothers and sisters, is commonplace. Is this the kind of country we want to be?”

Hovering over each dot on the Child Fatalities from Firearms Since the Sandy Hook Shooting map brings up a new tragedy; There’s Logan Cookson, a 10-year-old who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the abdomen while he was hunting in Cabot, Vermont on May 24, 2014.

There’s McKaya Ledford, a 10-year-old who was accidentally shot in the neck by her brother on March 17, 2015, in Comanche, Oklahoma.

Then there’s the tragic story of seven-year-old Isabella Oliva, whose mum shot and killed her two young daughters before turning the gun on herself the same day her fiance packed up his belongings and moved out of her house, in Syracuse, Utah, on January 14, 2014.

And sadly, it’s not getting any better for our kids, latest data by NBC News on gun deaths “provides no evidence that kids are safer today than they were three years ago”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NBC News, homicide was the “Number one cause of death by gun for kids and young teens (59 per cent), followed by suicide (22 per cent) and unintentional (16 per cent).

“In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, 460 children and young teens died from gunshot wounds, the highest number since 1999,” it reads.

“The overall death rate also ticked higher, to 0.8 per 100,000, up from a low of 0.6 per 100,000, most recently attained in 2011.”

There’s depressingly little being done to change this, as gun control fades from a federal issue to a state issue. But with that, problems persist. And the Law Centre to Prevent Gun Violence refers to it as the “most dangerous gap in federal firearms laws”.

While federal law requires licensed firearms dealers to perform background checks on prospective purchasers and maintain records of all gun sales, it does not require unlicensed “private” sellers to do so. This means almost three-quarters of Americans don’t require background checks to buy a gun.

32 of 50 US states do not require these types of checks between private individuals.

According to the LCTPGV, 40 per cent of all firearms sold in the US are by unlicensed sellers.

That means two out of every five guns in the United States change hands without a background check.

“In your state you could go on Craigslist and if someone is selling a firearm, you call them up and that’s it,” said Ms Anderman. “There’s virtually no regulation of those sales, there’s no record required.”

It’s little relief to Mrs Duytschaever.

“We were engulfed in a grief so brutal and so profound that an explanation was the last thing we sought,” she wrote.

“We just wanted life the way it had been. We wanted Noah back. We still do. Badly.

“Kids have the right to grow up. Parents and grandparents have the right to see them do it. We don’t need another reason.”

— youngma@news.com.au