Six years later, holding hope for progress

This week will mark six years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, an anniversary still difficult to absorb. The facts are well known: On the morning of Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, a heavily armed 20-year-old shot his way into the elementary school he once attended. Minutes, and 154 bullets later, 20 first-graders and six educators lay dead.

How to carry on — for the families, classmates, town, region, state — could not be known. There would be no road map to normalcy, because normalcy had been redefined.

From the ache of the tragedy emerged several causes. One of the broadest was the mission to halt gun violence.

Connecticut in spring 2013 passed some of the most comprehensive gun safety laws in the country. The hope was that Congress would act, too. But it did precious little.

If the senseless death of first-graders couldn’t move the hearts of the NRA-beholden Congress, what could?

In the years that followed, we discovered the answer was nothing. Not the mass shootings at houses of worship in Charleston and Texas and Pittsburgh, not mass shootings at nightclubs, an outdoor concert, a Christmas party, colleges, and in February, a high school in Florida.

As of Dec. 1, a total of 324 mass shootings have occurred in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Recognition that this country is gripped in an epidemic of gun violence is incontrovertible.

But now public awareness is spreading and a majority of Americans support common sense gun safety measures. No longer should the issue be framed as gun rights versus gun control. Many gun users say they want safety for their children, their families, too, and know that measures, such as expanded background checks, do not affect their rights.

Citizens are rejecting Congress’ lack of significant action. In the November elections, voters gave Democrats who back gun safety a majority in the House of Representatives. Caucus polling data showed that “for people voting for Democrats in the 2018 election, the number one issue was health care, the number two issue was guns,” said Sen. Chris Murphy.

He was speaking in Washington the day after the national vigil service in Washington where nearly 150 families affected by gun violence and survivors joined with advocates from 21 states in “mourning and loving remembrance.” The vigil marked the sixth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy.

Change has been agonizingly slow, but this coming year holds hope for progress. Representatives in the House should raise — and pass — legislation in basic areas, such as banning bump stocks, which allow rapid firing of rifles, as Connecticut did this year. It should legislate against 3D printable guns that cannot be traced; it should fund gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Republican-led Senate may listen to the people and approve such basic legislation.

By now we should feel safer. By now we should feel children are safer. We do not.

That this country is gripped in an epidemic of gun violence is incontrovertible.