On the Monday after the Friday ... after a weekend of evocative stories, images, analysis about a small-town in America saturated in sorrow, some people know what the rest of us can never know. Today, amidst the grief ... the calls for change ... the fallout that put a little place called Newtown on the world map, we hear from three people whose own encounter with the horror of a school shooting shapes what they need us to hear.

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Sandy Hook, Columbine & Taber: Life after a mass shooting - Panel

We started this segment with a clip from American President Barack Obama speaking in Newtown, Connecticut last night at a vigil for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Twenty children all aged 6 or 7 ... six adult women at the school ... the 20-year-old shooter's mother died in his rampage on Friday.

27 murdered ... the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history. And amid the shock and the grieving, it has re-ignited longstanding debates in that country about gun laws and school safety.

For survivors of previous school shootings and their loved ones, this latest tragedy has also pushed old but still visceral emotions back to the fore.

For their reaction and their first-hand perspective on how survivors and their families through something like this ... we were joined by three people.

Craig Scott was a 16 year old student at Columbine high school when that shooting took place in 1999. His sister Rachel was one of the 12 students killed that day. The two students who showed up with guns and bombs that day also killed a teacher before turning the weapons on themselves. Craig Scott joined us from our studio in New York.

Peggy Lindholm is the mother of a Columbine high school student who survived -- she and her daughter Marjorie co-author the book A Columbine Survivor's Story. We reached her in Littleton, Colorado.

And Reverend Dale Lang's 17-year-old son Jason Lang was killed in the shooting at W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta in 1999 - 8 days after Columbine - it also left another boy seriously injured. Rev. Lang was on the line from Taber.

This segment was produced by The Current's Shannon Higgins and Idella Sturino.

Other segment from today's show:

Senator Doug Finley on politics and cancer

Mali on the Brink: Should there be intervention?