Victims’ families have prevailed in legal fights with conspiracy theorists and a lawsuit against gun-maker Remington that held the company responsible for its marketing of military-style rifles like those used in the Newtown and Uvalde attacks.įor Mark Barden, a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, the Texas shooting was all the more frustrating because of everything that has been learned about how looking out for warning signs can prevent such tragedies. Trainings offered to schools by Sandy Hook groups have been credited with stopping potential suicides and school shootings. One of the best known groups, Sandy Hook Promise, pivoted afterward to campaigns that helped pass state laws limiting sales of some guns and, more recently, to community-based prevention programs. In the first months after the Newtown shooting, much of the families’ advocacy work centered on gun control, particularly a failed effort in 2013 to get a federal law banning some semi-automatic weapons and expanding criminal and mental background checks for gun purchases. The vast majority of people don’t go into schools and shoot them up,” Vogl said.
“If I can’t stay optimistic I need to quit and find something else to do.
The effort was launched after the Newtown attack by Hensel and her husband, Jeremy Richman, who died by suicide in 2019. It’s brutal because it triggers some of the darkest memories we have,” said Vogl, executive director at the National Mental Health Innovation Center in Colorado, where the program is based.