Families of gun violence victims, lawmakers say they are more hopeful than ever a change is coming in gun regulations

Kristin Song ran through a cemetery in her pajamas last Tuesday morning, shouting excitedly toward the tombstone that marks her teenage son’s grave.

That morning, she’d gotten news that Ethan’s Law, a state law named for her son and introduced to Congress in 2019, may be part of an upcoming package of gun violence-related legislation expected to be voted on in Washington, D.C.

The first person she wanted to tell was Ethan. So she jumped in her car dressed in pajama bottoms with red dogs on them and a T-shirt and drove to the nearby cemetery to share the news, she said.

She ran across the cemetery shouting excitedly to her son. She then sat by his gravestone in the quiet of the morning and whispered to him that she would never stop fighting to save children like him from dying the way he did.

Ethan Song, 15, was killed when he accidentally shot himself with a firearm that had been stored in a bedroom closet in a friend’s home in Guilford.

Last week in Hartford, Song wrapped her arms tightly around Mark Barden — whose 7-year-old son Daniel Barden was fatally shot in his first grade classroom in Sandy Hook nearly 10 years ago. For the first time in a while, they shared a mutual hope.

“I’m so hopeful,” Barden said to her.

Connecticut lawmakers said they’re hopeful, too. More hopeful than they’ve been in nearly a decade, when their state became home to the nation’s deadliest mass school shooting on Dec. 14, 2012, and launched them to the forefront of the fight for what they call common sense gun regulations.

Then and now, voices across the nation cried out: This is the time. If not now, then never.

President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday night and called for Congress to reinstate a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines or to raise the minimum age for buying them from 18 to 21; to strengthen background checks; to enact red flag laws and safe storage laws like Ethan’s Law; to repeal immunities that protect gun manufacturers from liability; and to address the nation’s mental health crisis.

Biden said that the day before Memorial Day, he stood outside of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 white crosses bear the names of the victims of the shooting — 19 of them children. In both Uvalde and Buffalo, where 10 Black people were fatally shot in a racially motivated mass shooting at a supermarket, the president said families of victims had the same singular plea: “Do something.”

“After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Parkland, nothing has been done,” Biden said. “This time that can’t be true. This time we must actually do something.”

Sandy Hook didn’t turn out to be the catalyst for federal gun legislation that many hoped it would be. And neither have the many, many, many mass shootings that have happened since.

But for many, this moment feels different.

David Hogg, a survivor of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead and another 17 wounded, said on Twitter: “This time is different.”

Hogg’s post was paired with a conversation he had with a person who said they were calling senators to urge them to pass gun laws. That person, in their message to Hogg, echoed the same sentiment: “This time IS different.”

Hogg is a founder and board member of March For Our Lives, a student-led demonstration formed after the shooting in Parkland. The group is set to march on Washington on June 11, with many parents, family and friends of victims, survivors, advocates and lobbyists from Connecticut planning to make the trip to the U.S. Capitol to march.

Hogg said that the point of the march is to take an initial step in “building the infrastructure to substantially reduce gun deaths.” But he doesn’t expect it to be a quick or easy fight.

“Let me be as clear as possible — just because this time is different doesn’t mean it’s going to end tonight, this year, or even and then in the next five,” he said on Twitter.

Barden, co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, said that for one of the first times in the 10 years since his son was killed, this feels like a moment when real change could occur.

“I hate that it takes something like this. It breaks my heart that it’s coming at such a cost,” said Barden of the lives lost in Uvalde. “But hold onto this pain, if you’re feeling it right now, so we don’t have to wait for another horrible tragedy.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, en route to a march and rally in Newtown on Friday night for National Gun Violence Awareness Day, said that although there is no hard deadline for passing the gun violence legislation he and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy are hoping for, he thinks Americans will know “within a days or weeks” whether Republican senators are “sincere about stopping gun violence.”

He said his hope is that the U.S. Senate is on the verge of a bipartisan step.

“I’m more hopeful than ever since Sandy Hook that we can take that step,” he said recently in Hartford as he stood with Song, Barden and survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting.

On Friday he said he was still hopeful that the Senate will reach a compromise on a package of what he says are common sense gun laws that will achieve bipartisan support from 60 senators — the number needed to pass such laws.

The package they’ve been working on includes a red flag restriction on gun purchases, a provision for extended background checks and more support for mental health care and school safety.

He’s also still working to include Ethan’s Law, which requires all firearms, loaded and unloaded, to be safely stored if in a home with anyone under 18.

Blumenthal said the compromise they’re looking for on the federal level is modeled after Connecticut’s laws. The state, he said, has been at the forefront of passing common sense gun measures and proving that they work.

Blumenthal said he’s been encouraged by extensive conversations he’s had with his Republican colleagues over the past week, but is approaching the issue with “clear eyes” and is not hopeful for a “magical” solution to the issue plaguing the nation.

“I’m making no promises except that we’re going to continue working and talking and listening,” he said.

But he is hopeful.

“I’m still very hopeful and determined to work toward 60 [votes], because that’s the only way we can save lives,” he said. “We need to pass something to save lives.”

Blumenthal said that over the past week, he’s been hearing the same message repeated over and over as he’s talked with Connecticut residents: “We need to do something.”

His guess is that his Republican colleagues across the map are hearing the same.

Murphy said they aren’t trying to solve all gun violence overnight, but are working to “find some common ground on changes to our gun laws to make sure that dangerous people don’t get their hands on dangerous weapons.”

Murphy, whose speech about gun violence on the Senate floor just hours after the shooting in Uvalde went viral, said that he was heartbroken to hear his own young children having conversations in school about how to survive a shooting.

He said he plans to work “every single minute of every single day to try to get our Republican colleagues to say yes to a compromise.”

“I hope they are moved by what they have witnessed the way that the rest of this country has been moved,” he said.

Shannon Watts, a mother of five who founded Moms Demand Action, has been advocating for public safety measures to protect Americans from gun violence for years. The organization — which now has a chapter in every state — began as a grassroots movement the day after the shooting at Sandy Hook, when Watts felt compelled to help mobilize other mothers who wanted a safer future for their kids.

“It’s inspiring to see the groundswell of support for gun safety all across the country because this is more than a moment; it’s a movement,” Watts told The Courant. “We’re encouraged to see real bipartisan negotiations going on in the Senate right now, but it isn’t about our hope that something gets done. It’s our expectation that lawmakers do the right thing, to act with integrity, uphold their duty and act to keep us safe. We don’t need thoughts and prayers from lawmakers. We need action.”

“We have a moment of supreme opportunity and obligation,” Blumenthal said Friday. “It’s a moment of moral imperative, and we need to seize it.”

Barden said that he feels the weight of the moment, too.

Parents who have lost children to gun violence, like Barden and Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Nicole Hockley, said they are aware of the collective trauma the recent spike in mass shootings has caused. They’ve urged people to take care of themselves and their families, to do what feels right for their own mental well-being.

Barden also called on them to turn their anger into action.

“You’re feeling rage. You’re feeling hurt by what happened in Uvalde, Texas. Hold onto that. Let it push you forward. Don’t allow yourself the luxury of soothing yourself,” he said in the days immediately following the shooting. “Take that outrage and turn it into action. Don’t let it die with the news cycle. Keep it in your heart. Keep those children’s faces in your heart and think to yourself ,‘What can I do? Can I do more? Who can I help?’ Everyone needs to be involved. We owe it to our children.”