82 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.”48 He put himself in the shoes of those that lost a loved one, and as a parent, was heartbroken for the families of the lost. As the Empathizer-in-Chief, President Obama used empathy as his symbolic dimension to draw the nation together and begin to heal. Through empathy, President Obama displayed moral leadership to the nation and showed the world that children should not live in fear. He showed that it is the job of each American to put themselves in the shoes of those that had lost love ones at Sandy Hook and remember that raising children is not just the job of parents, but requires the “help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.”49 President Obama used his symbolic dimension of being the Empathizer-in-Chief to help the nation see the massacre at Sandy Hook through the eyes of those that had lost loved ones. CONCLUSION President Obama displayed moral leadership to the nation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting. However, it is important to note that school shootings and other mass shootings have not stopped after the Sandy Hook incident. This fact was noted recently during the 2020 Democratic Presidential campaign when South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, “I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings. We have now produced the second shooting generation in this country. We dare not allow there to be a third.”50 President Obama’s goal was to change the way that these shootings are viewed: they must not be one-off events. Instead, they must be treated as part of a problem to be addressed at its root lever so that every community in the nation and every person, no matter their age, has the right to live a life with freedom from fear. He aimed to show that these weapons, which have destroyed so many lives, would not cause more fear in the world. President Obama used his words, deeds, actions, and symbolic dimensions to display moral leadership to the nation and the people of the world.
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