I'm the Mother of a Murdered Child. No One Else Has to Be.

[onehandle]

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As a Newtown mom, I remember the resolve President Barack Obama showed me when we met for the first time in December 2012. The honor of meeting a sitting president is numbed when the reason is that your 6-year-old child is dead, gunned down in his first-grade classroom. Yet even through my grief, I sensed that Obama was reacting first as a parent faced with the unimaginable. It is no surprise to me that in recent interviews, the president has since called the failure to enact gun policy reform a major “frustration” of his tenure in office.

Those early days following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre were as painful as they were surreal. But in the months after the tragedy, many mobilized to fight for change. My neighbors dragged me out of bed on a frozen winter evening to a friend’s living room where we would form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence. Obama called on Congress to try to keep our children, our families, safer. Working across the aisle, Senators Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) tried but failed to advance a bill that would bring background checks to all 50 states.

At the time, it felt like another kind of death. Somehow, we managed to survive this profound disappointment and realized that while our hearts were broken, our spirits were not. Compelled to find the path forward, I’ve crisscrossed the country and found that people want change. I’ve spent countless hours in school auditoriums and church basements with Americans of all stripes. I am asked the same questions: “How do you go on? What can we do? How many more? How will we stop this?”

Sadly, we’re not yet stopping it. Gun violence goes on unabated. In late July another shooter entered an American movie theater, this time during the showing of comedian Amy Schumer’s movie, “Trainwreck,” in Lafayette, Louisiana, and killed two people, injuring nine others. Afterward, Schumer and her cousin, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), announced they were teaming up to push for new gun-safety legislation. More shootings erupted across the country this week, starting in Ferguson, Missouri, which was placed under a state of emergency on the anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/newtown-dylan-hockley-gun-violence-121261.html#.VcyggHjrj8v

[CTyankee]

1. my brother lost his daughter to gun violence when she was only 24 years old.

He was never the same and he died just broken...

[brer cat]

3. I cannot fully imagine the grief a parent feels losing a child

beyond knowing it has to be devastating. I am so sorry that you lost both your niece and brother...and he was probably lost long before he died.

In my neck of the woods, where guns rule, there is a man who sets up tables full of guns by the side of the road with a yard sale sign. WTF. Can't we have SOME regulation?

[CTyankee]

4. she was killed in Dallas, TX, where my brother and I were from...he stayed in TX and

I never went back to live after I went East to college. I moved to NYC where I was happier.

[cali]

2. gun violence in this country is a tragedy

but it's nuts to say that even the most draconian gun laws would stop the murder of children, including the murders from.guns.

More germane is that the 2nd mean that there can be no draconian gun laws. I don't believe even.the most liberal SCOTUS would interpret it to mean no individual right to own a gun, and that's what it would take to enact sweeping gun control.