It's been six months since that awful day. Six months since we heard about a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, since we started to realize it was going to be something truly awful, since we waited to hear about that last classroom of children who hadn't been reunited with their parents, then realized that was not going to happen. Six months since we saw President Obama fighting back tears as he spoke about the tragedy. And in those six months, strengthening gun laws has seemed more possible than it had in decades, but the broken Senate has also failed us. And the parents of Newtown are
still fighting.
Today's six-month anniversary is a day of action, culminating a week in which Newtown family members have visited the Capitol, meeting with lawmakers and reading the names of nearly 4,800 shooting victims since December 14 alone, and the launch of a Mayors Against Illegal Guns bus tour building support for background checks. It's a fight between the memory of 20 children and six adults who died trying to save them, and the gun lobby's forces of fear. Children like seven-year-old Daniel Barden:
His niece started a Facebook page called "What Would Daniel Do?" that encourages people to reach out to others who may be troubled.
"Go talk to the kid sitting alone, which is—Daniel was known for that," said Barden. "We want to move that ... Facebook site into a more of a foundation, where it can reach more people and do more good."
And the
drive for more fear as described by Bill Clinton:
“What’s going on is that these organized interest groups don’t want anything done because it’s a big source of their money and support to terrify people living out there in the country and try to make them think there’s this big conspiratorial federal government trying to take all their guns away,” Clinton said on “Morning Joe.”
Thanks to the filibuster, it's especially easy for the "be afraid" caucus to prevail in the Senate. But the fight isn't over, the Newtown parents are not going away—how can they, when their grief is with them to stay?—and the momentum and the public opinion are on the side of changing our laws to make mass shootings a less regular feature of American life. As former Rep. Gabby Giffords and Roxana Green, the mother of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, who was shot and killed moments after Giffords was shot,
write:
These are moments that stay with us forever. The last conversations, the last glimpses, the plans made and not kept as gunfire erupted. We do not choose the grief we feel—but what we do choose is what our grief is to us—what it motivates us to do. Today, we choose and pledge that we will take our grief, and on behalf of our loved ones and those lost in Newtown, in Santa Monica, in Aurora, and so many places that don’t make headlines, we will not stop fighting until our government has come to its senses.