John,
It was a Friday morning in a crowded newsroom that changed my life. As headlines from around the world flashed across my screen and fellow producers printed off scripts and hustled to get their videos edited, a single word in a breaking news alert caught my eye: Newtown.
I couldn't believe that the few lines about my hometown marked "extremely urgent" could be true: 26 dead, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook School. I went back to my apartment, packed a bag as the president spoke with tears in his eyes and drove home to Newtown in the December darkness.
Images from the following days are seared into my memory—parents carrying unspeakable grief as they leaned into each other on the parish steps. Teddy bears and flowers piled in the cold under the village Christmas tree. Hearses bearing coffins far too small. Satellite trucks idling on lawns as reporter after reporter from around the world asked: How could this happen?
Easy access to guns by someone who never should have had them is how this could happen, and nine years later, we must fight harder than ever to ensure it never happens again.
The gun lobby wants you to believe this is the world we have to live in and that hopelessness and resignation are the only available follow-up to thoughts and prayers. But our grassroots movement knows another America is possible.
John, today, I'm counteracting the gun lobby's cynicism with action and continuing to push for a future free from gun violence. Join me in taking the pledge and recommitting yourself to this urgent fight in the coming year.
As I write this, the Oxford High School community is grieving after a 15-year-old used a gun he should never have been able to access to kill four people and wound seven more.
And America’s gun violence crisis is far greater than the headlines reveal: mass shootings make up less than 1 percent of the more than 38,000 gun deaths in our country every year, and firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and teens.
Remembering December 14 still brings tears to my eyes. I am the mother of a little boy now, and the anguish of Sandy Hook has taken on a new weight in the nine years since. I left my job in news this year to work for Everytown because I believe our children should be able to grow up and live in a country free of the existential threat of gun violence.
Thank you for your continued work to save lives. It's never been more important.
Kaelyn Forde
Associate Director of Field and Volunteer Communications
