Imagine one child.
Big numbers can start to lose meaning. So imagine just one child. Imagine someone’s six year-old daughter.
Which crayon was her favorite to draw with? What did she like doing at recess? Had she mastered the art of tying her own shoes yet? What did she want to be when she grew up?
Imagine the day she wouldn’t come home. Imagine the day 20 little kids and six educators wouldn’t come home, senselessly gunned down by a weapon of war, in a quaint Connecticut elementary school.
Five years.
It’s been five years since the Sandy Hook shooting brought a nation to its knees in agony and in prayer — nearly as long as those kids had on this Earth.
The families of the victims have somehow climbed back to their feet, bravely marching for action in hopes that some other family may be spared their pain. But Congress takes its marching orders from the gun lobby.
Many of us remember exactly where we were when we learned about the sickening tragedy in Newtown.
We are still there.
We are still where we were when we heard about Aurora and Navy Yard, Charleston and Orlando, Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs. Congress has left us there, with their thoughts and prayers and nothing else.
This is an epidemic in America, and in America alone. It’s an epidemic of willful negligence.
Imagine one child. Imagine 20. Imagine, if you can, 150,000 people — that’s how many Americans have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook.
If you had the power to do something about this, imagine lacking the courage.
Today, we pay tribute to the lives of the 20 children that were stolen five years ago in Newtown — and to the six educators who heroically sacrificed their own trying to save them. May Congress summon just one iota of that courage to pass commonsense gun laws.
