Dear John,

It was ten years ago today, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Ten years ago, a man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in a small town in Connecticut and murdered 26 people with an AR-15 rifle. Twenty of the victims were six and seven year old children. The other six were educators.

The massacre occurred less than a month after the murder of my son Jordan. I was actively grieving the loss of my child from a senseless act of gun violence when I heard the news of this massacre in Newtown. The pain was unbearable.

When you lose a child to gun violence, you join a club that no one wants to be a part of. Every year, another wave of grief comes around the time of the event. My heart goes out to the families of the 26 people who were shot and killed that day, and I stand beside them on the anniversary of the day their lives changed forever.

After the events of 2012, I knew I had to turn my pain into purpose. I threw myself into activism to prevent gun violence in the United States, a journey that eventually led me to the halls of Congress. I’ve fought to enact legislation that would prevent any more tragedies like the Sandy Hook shooting, but progress has been slow.

This past May, a gunman entered an elementary school in Texas and killed 21 people. The fact that this happened ten years after Sandy Hook is unimaginable. In the last ten years, we’ve seen NRA-backed Republicans block our attempts at any reform to our gun laws, and time and time again, mass shootings continue to occur. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Gun violence is a preventable problem. Other countries don’t have the same epidemic of mass shootings, but Republicans and the gun lobbies choose to look the other way while the deaths keep piling up.

On behalf of the victims from Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and my son Jordan, I promise to keep leading the fight for change in Congress until real reform is enacted. I hope that ten years from now, we can finally say that these kinds of tragedies are a thing of the past.

Sincerely,
Lucy McBath