Newtown victim’s mother gives Obama’s address

Connecticut parent who lost 6-year-old son pleads for gun control

WASHINGTON— The mother of a 6year-old boy killed in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting made a deeply personal plea from the White House for action to combat gun violence, choking back tears almost from the start of her speech.

Francine Wheeler, whose son, Ben, was killed in the Dec. 14 attack inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, stepped in for U.S. President Barack Obama to deliver the president’s weekly radio and Internet address. She is the first person to deliver the address other than Obama or Vice-President Joe Biden since they took office in 2009.

“Thousands of other families across the United States are also drowning in our grief,” Wheeler said in the address. “Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy.”

Her husband, David Wheeler, sat silently next to her as she made the recording in the White House Library. Both wore the green pins that have become a symbol of the schoolhouse shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six adults. Obama asked Wheeler to deliver this week’s address, which was released Saturday. The White House said Wheeler and her husband wrote the remarks themselves. “Sometimes, I close my eyes and all I can remember is that awful day waiting at the Sandy Hook Volunteer Firehouse for the boy who would never come home — the same firehouse that was home to Ben’s Tiger Scout Den 6,” Francine Wheeler said. “But other times, I feel Ben’s presence filling me with courage for what I have to do, for him and all the others taken from us so violently and too soon.” Some of the Sandy Hook families, with Obama’s blessing, have launched a stepped-up effort to push a gun control bill through Congress. As the fate of the legislation appeared uncertain last week, Obama travelled to Hartford, Conn., to make his case for the law.