(soft music) - This afternoon I spoke with Governor Malloy and FBI Director Mueller.

I offered Governor Malloy my condolences on behalf of the nation.

The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and 10 years old.

So our hearts are broken today for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost.

This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another, but there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight, and I will do everything in my power as President to help.

- It was 10 years ago when a 20-year-old Connecticut man gunned down six educators and 20 first graders.

The mass shooting forever tied the name Sandy Hook and Newtown with gun violence.

For the past decade, the families have grieved while seeking solutions.

On this hour of "Cutline", we examine that grief, those solutions, and we ask, "Where do we go from here?".

From Connecticut Public, I'm Walter Smith Randolph, and this is "Cutline" 10 years after Sandy Hook.

(somber music) For the parents of Sandy Hook victims.

- Oh, my little Daniel.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Every day of the last 10 years has been a readjustment.

- 10 Years of struggle, of triumph, of hard work, of reprioritizing, maintaining focus on my marriage, and my role as a father, as my priority.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] While Mark Barden is focused on his family, he's also focused on gun safety.

As co-founder and CEO of the Sandy Hook Promise, Barden has channeled his pain into action.

- Where we set out on a simple mission to quite simply prevent other families from having to endure a lifetime of pain caused by preventable gun violence.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Barden works with Nicole Hockley, who is also a co-founder and CEO of the Sandy Hook Promise.

The mother of Dylan, Hockley says she has seen a lot of positive change over the last decade.

- From my perspective, what I've seen over the last 10 years is not only a concerted focus on school safety and the need to improve it, but really also a focus on trauma and the wellness of kids everywhere and the application of more student voice.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] So despite school shootings like Parkland and Uvalde continuing, Hockley and Barden say there's been progress, even though it may not seem so.

- All these organizations have come to life and have grown larger and stronger in these 10 years and the public support has grown significantly, if not exponentially.

Partly due to the work of all these great organizations and unfortunately also driven by this increasing drumbeat of violence in our communities, and also these mass casualty events in our schools, and shopping centers, and grocery stores, and places of worship, and concert venues.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] But Barden says he gets why it may seem like nothing has changed.

- When I hear people say, "If nothing happened after Sandy Hook, nothing's gonna happen," and I understand that frustration.

People wanna see more action at the federal level.

They wanna see more safety legislation and policy in place.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Which is why he was inspired by Senator Chris Murphy's impassioned speech to Congress after the Uvalde shooting.

- What are we doing?

Why are you here if not to solve a problem as existential as this?

This isn't inevitable.

These kids weren't unlucky.

This only happens in this country and nowhere else.

Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day.

- It's not about divisive politics, it's not about rights or freedoms.

It's about protecting our kids, and making our community safer, and the solutions that exist and allow us to do that without infringing on anybody's rights, so let's get busy right there.

There's lots of room for improvement right there.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Barden says action is already being taken.

He points to the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy.

The new law enhances background checks for those under 21, financially supports the implementation of red flag laws, while cracking down on gun trafficking, and investing in mental health services and school safety funding.

- We never had enough Republican partners in order to pass the law, but we were recruiting more and more year after year.

The gun safety movement was getting stronger and stronger.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Murphy says there's also movement on the state level, including right here in Connecticut.

- Well, Connecticut right now is in the process of improving its red flag laws.

It just passed an update and we now need to put that into action.

Connecticut's had a red flag law, but we haven't used it as much as we should.

There are probably a lot of people who are showing signs of danger to themselves or to others that should have their weapons temporarily taken away.

Laws like that, that are really working in places like Florida are saving lots of lives.

Connecticut can do better when it comes to the administration of its red flag laws, and I think that you'll see that happen in the next coming years.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] For Po Murray, this is encouraging news.

She too has dedicated the last decade to gun safety.

Events like these gun buyback programs fill up the former physical therapist's calendar these days.

- [Police Officer] This is probably the closest you'll get to an assault weapon, which, it's no different just to semiautomatic just that the stock folds sideways.

- So nearly a decade ago, my neighbor used an assault rifle and high capacity magazines to kill 20 children and six educators in Sandy Hook Elementary School, and at that point I decided that I needed to do something to honor with action.

- What has the last 10 years been like for you?

- It's been exhausting for me.

For a decade, I've led an all volunteer organization to give a platform for the community members from Newtown and families and survivors from Newtown and beyond, including families from Chicago, Oakland, Hartford, and elsewhere to elevate their voices in this movement.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] While Murray applauds the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, she wants to see more action.

- It's not enough.

We need to pass the assault weapons ban, the Universal Background Check bill, the federal version of Ethan's law that was passed in Connecticut to keep kids safe from unsecured guns, and we need more funding for community violence intervention programs, more money for gun violence research.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] Murray says what has changed over the last decade is the conversation.

She's noticed that more people are listening to gun safety advocates, while some of the louder voices like the NRA have softened.

- The majority of Americans are supporting gun safety measures that we spoke of, assault weapons ban, background checks, Ethan's Law for Safe Storage, and other measures.

It's only on Capitol Hill where a small fraction of elected officials are not supporting the measures that we support.

I mean, obviously there are some issues with our election process, and how our Congress is structured.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] But Murray, like Hockley and Barden are not deterred, and as they look at the coming years and mark the 10 year anniversary of an unthinkable tragedy, they are choosing hope.

- I feel like we are getting there.

I mean, a lot has happened since Sandy Hook.

We have all these wonderful organizations doing great work.

This is much more of a priority issue for Americans across the country in every demographic.

We know that from research and polls, so I am optimistic.

Sandy Hook Promise has stopped 11 school shootings right now by students who are trained in our Know The Sighs program that we can speak to, that we know of.

There probably are more, but these were 11 school shootings that were planned, and imminent, and ready to happen.

Students who were trained in our Know the Signs program followed the model, told their trusted adults, and intervention was made, and a tragedy didn't happen.

And so right there, combined with hundreds of suicides that were intervened upon and didn't happen, and individuals were connected to the support and the help that they need to get into a healthier space and get on with their lives, that's all the encouragement I need to know that we have something that works.

- [Walter Smith Randolph] This past November, a memorial for the victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting opened up quietly with no fanfare, just quiet reflection.

The same happened here in Bloomfield, when the Ana Grace Academy opened up.

Frankie Graziano sits down with Ana Grace's dad to talk about how grief has shaped the community.

(intense music) - Playing music for me is kind of central to who I am, so expressing myself in that way is a very natural thing to do, and when you're grieving, it is really essential to find ways, positive ways, constructive ways, meaningful ways, to express those emotions.

I wouldn't say that music is an outlet for grief per se.

I feel like when someone is grieving, when someone is going through a tragic loss as I have, that it's necessary to find every way possible to express that.

(jazz music) My name's Jimmy Green.

I'm a saxophonist, composer, I'm an educator, and I'm a recording artist and I am a professor here at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, and as a composer, I've written dozens and dozens of songs.

In the past 10 years, I've specifically, of my 13 albums that I've released as a band leader and lead artist, two of those albums in the past 10 years have been specifically dedicated to the character, to the memory, and to the life of my daughter, Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, who was one of the 20 children and six educators killed in Sandy Hook School in December, 2012.

One of those albums, "Beautiful Life," garnered two Grammy Award nominations in 2015.

(soft music) Whenever I think of my daughter Ana, I just think of how loving she was, how much joy she carried in her, and how much joy she reflected back out to the world.

Everyone she contacted, everyone she came in touch with, her friends at school, the teachers, she just was able to show love to so many people, and I think of that often when I think of her.

She loved music, she loved to sing, she loved to dance.

(soft music) There's a saying in our culture that time heals all wounds, and I wouldn't say that that's true in my case.

I would say that over time I become more familiar with the grief, and I'm able to manage it a bit more.

- Catastrophic loss is an enduring, lifelong kind of grief, and I don't think it gets easier.

I think as we learn to carry it, as we learn to build some psychological and emotional muscle, I don't know the weight changes, but we change in response to sort of carrying the weight of it, and our psychological and emotional muscles grow stronger.

I interviewed a number of people whose children and other loved ones were killed in the shootings, and there were a lot of really important findings.

I think the most important finding was that it's very important to understand what a primary griever is, and that the primary griever's needs need to be centered above others' needs.

- We had a very helpful mental health professional in our lives in the hours and days after Ana was killed.

Our son, who was two years older than Ana, who was in the building that day and who survived, and we were very scared about what his future was gonna look like, and what we should do right now for him, and she said to us, "The antidote for trauma is love, so surround your son with people who love him."

- We have to really defer to the people who are the primary grievers, to the people who lost, because they're the ones who face this every day.

Like there's not a single day when a parent who loses a child doesn't get out of bed in the morning and have to face this loss.

(soft music) - There's no playbook.

No one knows what to say, no one knows what to do, so be gentle with yourself.

We had to lean on community.

I can't stress how much, how important communities are in this day and age where we're kind of separated through screens and social media.

We're able to look at people's lives through a screen.

It's so important to form community, and to support communities that you're in because, for us, they made a humongous difference in our lives when we had our time of great need.

- It helps them.

It's almost like people help them build the muscle, because they remember their beloved child with them, because they invoke their presence.

They say their name.

They remember, they extend tenderness and compassion on hard days like Mother's Day or Father's Day.

- Usually when someone searches for the right thing to say or the best thing to say, it's usually for their own benefit, so they can walk away feeling like, a little better about themselves or, "I did something positive for that person."

Whereas what I've come to know is truth is that someone just being there, someone just being an ear to listen, someone just being someone to hear what you have to say is the most important thing, not that they had something really profound or deep to say to us.

It's just that they were there and they were willing to be really good listeners and not offer a lot of advice.

(saxophone music) The lyrics to "When I Come Home" talk about my great hope, as a person of faith, that we will be reunited with our loved ones who have passed before us in heaven, and when I come home, home is heaven in that case, and I miss Ana so much, I have something to look forward to after my days here are done, so that brings me great hope.

Most of the world after she was killed, saw some pictures of her and I wanted to go a little deeper than that and describe a little bit more about her as her dad, so that's what those lyrics were trying to reflect a little bit about what Ana was about.

The process of making music is quite a beautiful one.

There were, in crafting these albums in Ana's memory, there were a lot of tears, there's a lot of reflection, there's a lot of memories, there's a lot of anger.

When you grieve, you're not crying and sad and despondent a hundred percent of the time.

Even in the early days, remembering little funny things that Ana would do or say would bring me great joy, great happiness, but that's tempered with the great sadness of her not being there, and over time that continues, so really wonderful, warm, happy memories are right alongside the anger and the sadness that she was taken from us.

But ultimately there's a lot of love and there's a lot of joy, and there's a lot of just gratefulness.

Grateful that God chose to give us this beautiful little girl, and even though we only had her for six and a half years, our lives are so much better having known her and having had her in our home for that bit of time.

- School shootings have forever changed the role of educators and those working inside of classrooms.

The last 10 years have led to new safety and security measures.

Catherine Shen sits down with a group of educators who have close ties to Sandy Hook to get their perspective.

- With me at this time is Cameo Thorne.

She's a Restorative Practices Project Director at New Haven Public Schools, and Nicole Hockley, who is a co-founder and CEO for Sandy Hook Promise, whose son Dylan was a first grader at Sandy Hook.

And we are sitting in Barry Palmer's classroom at Darien High School where he teaches history.

Thanks all of you for being here today, appreciate it.

Nicole, first question is for you.

What has the last 10 years been like since what happened at Sandy Hook?

Has there been things that have changed or remained the same?

What has it been like for you?

- Well, from my perspective, what I've seen over the last 10 years is not only a concerted focus on school safety and the need to improve it, but really also a focus on trauma and the wellness of kids everywhere, and the application of more student voice.

When I think about these 10 years in particular and I think about my eldest son, my surviving son who was there that day as well, he's now a freshman in college.

And I think about this generation of kids these last 10 years, and what sort of trauma they've experienced across the country, and how we're still contributing to this by not always making them feel safe within their own schools, and not giving them necessarily any control over creating that safety.

So I've seen a lot of positive change, and I've seen a lot more change that needs to happen.

- So I mean, you mentioned student safety, we also wanna touch on teacher safety.

Now Barry, you were in Newtown that day, and now you're in Darien teaching.

What are you hearing from your fellow colleagues?

Are teachers feeling safe?

Do you feel safe?

How has that changed things?

- Overall I think on a general day to day basis, we feel generally safe in the classroom.

I would say there's probably not a teacher who's working anywhere in the country who hasn't run through the scenario in their head, "What do I do if X happens?"

So we kind of always have that somewhat in the back of our minds.

I've noticed changes as to if this gate is open, if that door was left unlocked, teachers seem to be much more hypervigilant about that today than they were maybe 10 years ago where they might not have noticed or spoken up if they saw a door left ajar.

We're much more focused on our surroundings and just making sure our kids are going to be safe if an emergency were to happen in the classroom during the school day.

- And so, Cameo, both Barry and Nicole had mentioned there has been changes and this is sort of your area, doing trauma training.

Have you seen an increase from teachers that need this training, and what does that training look like?

- So in my particular case, it's about creating community in the classroom.

It's much easier to feel like you belong when you create community, but then you know each other, you know each other's places where you plug in, you can feel like I can say to somebody today, "I'm feeling not like being here.

It's been a bad day for me."

The biggest problem with that in schools is that we talk about mental health and the needs of mental health is there aren't spaces that are put aside for kids or adults to have their mental health needs addressed in a moment, so I would think about like, we had a lockdown in New Haven at the beginning of the year where a student said there was a person with a gun in the building.

It's a large high school, there were a lot of kids, but when it was over, after hours, because a large school takes a long time to clear, teachers needed space.

Kids needed space.

How do we make room for their mental health after that moment?

'Cause they spent several hours in lockdown thinking there was somebody in the building, and then were escorted out by the police with their hands over their head because they didn't find anybody.

So, just in case, everybody had to come out like that.

So I think that anytime you're on a lockdown, when you know it wasn't a drill ahead of time, you are thinking, "Is this it?"

So I'm gonna go back and say, "Okay, now we're gonna open your books.

We're gonna read Raymond Carver today."

(Cameo laughs) It's like, nobody wants to do that right after that, and we have to sort of figure out how we wanna be.

- So what does that training for teachers look like then, to create that space?

- So I would say, when the kids come back, put 'em in a circle, talk about it, hit it head on.

"Everybody okay?

How you feeling?

What do you need right now?"

Very specifically, "What do you need right now?

Do we need time to chill?

Do you want listen to some music and read?

What do you want?

What do you need?"

Instead of just sort of plowing back into the school day.

- Something teachers need, and something that schools have been trying to implement in the last 10 years is giving teachers the tools to have those conversations with students, but also making sure we're giving kids the space who maybe aren't ready to have those conversations.

And it's a fine balance.

It's very challenging for a teacher because you've also just lived through this trauma that you've experienced and you have to compartmentalize your emotions, put them off to the side, and be there for your kids first.

But my concern is also what are we doing for those teachers after that, because yes, the kids are the priority.

We are here for kids.

They're the number one priority but we wanna make sure these teachers are healthy for their kids going on into the future and that's something I think we're still trying to figure out in education is how we have those tools and then what we do for the teachers going forward.

- And I'm a member of the American Federation of Teachers.

I'm a delegate with my local.

The AFT is paying for a trauma counseling for free for all AFT members and it's 24/7, and there's an additional policy that they can purchase that does more, but they can get immediate relief.

- Has there been any safety measures put into place or promises maybe that have not happened?

- Well, it depends how you're defining safety, 'cause I really look at this as a cycle and it does follow on after each other.

What we're talking about a lot right now is preparedness and either restoration, or reunification afterwards.

So it's very much focused on preparing for an event in terms of security measures, drills and lockdowns, or how do we deal with trauma potential from afterwards.

The third part of that, and the most important part from my perspective, is the prevention.

Because if we're not working with students and teachers and administrators on how to recognize when someone needs help and give them the tools and resources to get that person to help, then all you're ever gonna do is be focusing on preparedness and restoration or reunification.

You're not actually creating safe environments, in my opinion.

So I think too much of our response is after tragedy, and thinking about what can we do to bulletproof the windows or lock the doors?

Why don't we focus on stopping the tragedy from happening in the first place?

And I think too many schools and districts that I see around the country aren't necessarily getting that balance right.

They're reactive and focused on preparedness, and what about after the event rather than all of the things, the simple things that we can do that prevent the acts from happening in the first place.

So I think that's what's missing in a lot of people's school safety plans.

- And I think the conversation needs to be held outside of just the school.

It's really a community conversation because I agree that a lot of it is reactive.

Every time a new tragedy happens, school districts might implement new strategies to try and prevent the next tragedy happening in their district, but they're not addressing the underlying causes that are causing these tragedies to happen over and over again nationwide.

And I think that's where really you need the proactive approach.

Like is school security officers proactive?

You might say, well that could prevent something happening in our particular school, but you're not addressing the underlying causes that are going to lead to these tragedies every day almost.

Every week we have a school tragedy somewhere in this country.

- So now we kind of talked about it a little bit, but the next question is sort of on point in terms of prevention.

We've been talking about teacher safety and teacher trauma training but we obviously can't talk about this without mentioning students, because it goes both ways, right?

Is that something that teachers can do more for students or does it lie in the families to do the preventative work or is it a mix of both?

- I think it's a mix of both.

In fact, one of the things I've been trying to do is working a little bit with Clifford Beers to start some community circles, because the time you're the most disconnected is when you feel helpless and you have no agency, right?

And the truth is we're not gonna create a world for our students and for ourselves unless we're doing it together.

- It takes a village, right?

I mean it's cliche, but it's true.

I think the school district can provide resources for families to have conversations with their children at home, but I think teachers also want the tools to be able to facilitate those conversations for those students if they wanna have those in the classroom, so I think it's a combination.

but I do think the school, anytime you're dealing with anything with children, I think the community also looks towards the school for guidance.

So I think as much as we can do to provide school districts with those resources - I know Sandy Hook Promise does amazing things for school districts all across the country - I think the better.

- I love everything that's already been said and I think that teachers are absolute superheroes, and that we ask a huge amount of them.

And community engagement and parent engagement varies district to district, school to school, but it is the biggest challenge that I often hear about from schools across the country.

How do we ensure that the lessons, especially the wellness lessons being taught in the school to kids go out into the community and how do you link it to an afterschool club?

How do you ensure a kid is safe on the way to school, or on the way home from school?

And that's why I focus my work on the kids themselves first and foremost, because I think they need to have a voice at the table.

They are the eyes and ears of the school.

They are seeing and hearing things that the adults around them won't.

Adults, we might sense that something is off, but the kids are on Discord, Twitch.

They're on channels that we're not, so helping them and giving them the tools and the agency to look out for each other and sustain that community themselves, I think that is a critical component that can work in conjunction with teachers and strengthen it overall.

If we just focus on the adults, I don't think we're gonna be successful.

- Well then you mentioned kids are the eyes and ears, right?

They're on the ground, they're hearing things, they're on these platforms that adults may not be on, and I wanna pose this question to all three of you actually, because you're in a community setting, you're in a classroom setting, and it seems like more and more Gen Zs, more and more young people are getting involved, and whether or not it's talking to each other, or helping create policy, actually, right, they're much more involved than I say the previous generation or when I was in school.

Do you think that makes a difference?

And what needs to happen in order for whatever that change needs to be?

Start with you.

- I think that I'm very impressed with this current generation and what I've seen from them is if you give them the tools and the ability to lead and create change, they will, and I think a lot about some of our practices around creating clubs within schools to sustain the programs and lessons, that it's not just, you come in once, and then you disappear for a year.

The students lead the activities, they lead the culture within their school.

That came from kids in a school in Oklahoma telling me, they said, "Look, we're practicing all these active shooter drills.

We don't like them.

We understand why we're doing them, but we would rather do..." They changed their school environment to say, "Every time we have an active shooter drill we're going to do one of the 'Say Something Activities,' because we would rather practice how to prevent violence rather than practice for when it happens."

So I think listening to kids, I mean, I think it's too late for my generation in many respects, but allowing kids to actually help lead the way, I think that's where we're gonna have the greatest success for this country.

- Kids want a voice and I mean just last year I saw, all across the country, students speaking at local board of education meetings and realizing how to find their voice, and the more we trust them to be an active participant in whatever problems they're trying to solve in our schools and our communities for kids, the better.

And they can handle it.

- So we got kid's voices out there.

We got adult's voices out there.

So I wanna talk to Nicole real quick.

Back in the summer, Senator Chris Murphy had said he was confident that Congress was gonna be able to reach a deal on the gun laws.

Do you think we're at that point where there's gonna be a shift?

Is there a shift?

Or where do you think that's going?

- Well, this summer we did pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which is the biggest piece of gun safety legislation in three decades, so I think we've made a significant step forward and I was really, I mean my organization worked very heavily on that, drafting pieces of the bill, but what I was happy to see was that there were some sensible gun safety measures in there, but a lot of support for mental health, a lot of funding available, a lot of dedication to community violence intervention plans, so it was a very holistic thing in terms of guns specifically.

That is still such a polarizing and divisive issue within our country.

I think that any more extreme change would be quite some time before that comes, but I have hopes, great hopes in the next couple years for how we market firearms to kids.

I have great hopes for a dedicated focus on safe storage, and how to ensure that a child can't access a weapon.

So I think there's progress to be made still, but I think we should celebrate how far we've come in three decades.

- We've seen so many school shootings since Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde, if this many children dying doesn't change anything, what do you think will force that change?

- I think it's the kids growing up that are gonna create that change quite simply.

I think the will of people across the country is there.

No one is pro gun violence, no one is pro school shooting.

We just can't necessarily, as adults sometimes find that common language and framework to agree on things that will keep kids safe.

So I do think it's the kids that are going to change that because I think that where you talk about legislation, that's not gonna move anytime soon.

However, programmatically, education, things like designated driver that I grew up with that changed behavior of a generation and that is what I teach my kids, so it's changing that generation.

Prevention, upstream violence prevention, and recognizing signs and creating community and leading in, that's behavioral change that our kids are gonna grow up with now, and they'll create a better future as a result of that.

- Wanna extend any last thoughts from the three of you?

- I think for me, when we talk about needing more mental health for our teachers, for our students, what that ultimately means is that we need spaces and places in schools and qualified people to be in those spaces to offer palliative care to students, to teachers if they need it.

And we need to make room for that to happen in the school day 'cause that's where it's happening.

And that's gonna take a radical shift.

- And I think teachers and students need to be part of the decision making process.

This is not something Washington or Hartford can throw money at and to say, "Oh, we're gonna have this mental health position, and all our problems are gonna be solved, or we're just gonna throw money towards mental health."

What does that mean?

What does that mean to a student?

What does that mean to a teacher?

And I think the more we have student and teacher voices as part of the decision making process, the more we'll actually be able to address some of the root causes that we're hopeful to address.

- Whenever a child or a student is showing us a behavior, whether it's positive or negative, there is something going on and it's a communication to us.

And if we respond with punitive measures or zero tolerance, then you're not actually helping that child.

There are tools available to help teachers and educators.

There are tools available to help kids and if we lean into that positivity, then we're gonna create real change.

- Great, well, I just wanna take a moment and thank you all for joining us today.

Again, Cameo Thorne is a Restorative Practices Project Director at New Haven Public Schools, and Nicole Hockley is a CEO and co-founder for Sandy Hook Promise.

Thank you both for joining us today.

And thank you Barry Palmer, for letting us be in your classroom and sharing your experiences with us.

- [Barry Palmer] Thank you.

- [Catherine Shen] Thank you so much.

- [Cameo Thorne & Nicole Hockley] Thank you.

- Since Sandy Hook, there have been more than 50 shootings on school campuses across the country.

So what's being done to prevent them?

Our Lisa Hagen sat down with Senator Chris Murphy to get answers.

- Senator Murphy, thank you for joining us here on Cutline.

- Yeah, thank you.

- We're now 10 years out from the Sandy Hook school shooting, and a lot has happened.

What has and hasn't changed?

And can you reflect on the healing process over the past decade?

- I think it's really hard to put into words what happens to a community when something like this happens.

Newtown was a wonderful place before the shooting.

It's still a wonderful place, but it's changed.

There's still a lot of pain, and a lot of hurt.

There's a lot of trauma in Newtown.

There's also been a lot of grace.

So many of these families have put their energies into starting up nonprofits and organizations to try to help those in need, and that's made a big difference.

Newtown has shown a lot of love for those families, and it's healed, but it'll never be back to what it was.

So, Newtown is a different place, a changed place for better and for worse, and I think the country is obviously very changed.

What happened in Newtown changed the politics and the culture of this country.

It set in motion a political movement determined to try to make sense of the nation's gun laws, but it also set off the gun lobby in a pretty radical direction that it has not yet come back from.

So both the community and the country are in very different places since that awful day in December of 2012.

- Let's start with Connecticut First.

The state passed a law after Sandy Hook that strengthened the state's assault weapons ban.

It required background checks for all firearm purchases.

Has that law been effective in preventing gun violence, and would you like to see more done at the state level?

- I was so proud of what Connecticut did in the wake of Sandy Hook.

We already had pretty tough gun laws in Connecticut, but they weren't tough enough.

There were still too many loopholes, and what Connecticut did was remarkable, in part because it was bipartisan.

The gun lobby opposed everything that was happening in Hartford, but Republicans came together with Democrats, and passed legislation that did make a difference.

Connecticut has amongst the lowest gun homicide rates in the nation, and that is due in part to our gun laws.

There's just no doubt that in this state, it is harder to get your hands on an illegal weapon.

It's harder to get your hands on an assault weapon and that means that we have safer communities, safer schools.

Nothing will get us back those kids that died in Sandy Hook, but we know that there's a lower chance you're gonna die of a gun death or gun homicide in Connecticut, because we've chosen to make our laws some of the strongest in the nation.

I think what's important in Connecticut is not just that we have strong gun laws, but that there's not a lot of complaints from gun owners that our laws are too tough.

You can still get a gun in Connecticut if you want one for the protection of your home, or you want to shoot or hunt.

The gun laws in Connecticut are tough, but they're not so tough that people can't exercise their Second Amendment rights.

- Anything else at the state level that you'd like to see, or you're more to focus at this point on federal?

- Well, Connecticut right now is in the process of improving its red flag laws.

It just passed an update and we now need to put that into action.

Connecticut's had a red flag law, but we haven't used it as much as we should.

There are probably a lot of people who are showing signs of danger to themselves or to others, that should have their weapons temporarily taken away.

Laws like that, that are really working in places like Florida, are saving lots of lives.

Connecticut can do better when it comes to the administration of its red flag laws, and I think that you'll see that happen in the next coming years.

- As you know, it's taken years for Congress to act and pass major gun reforms, and so we've seen this repeated cycle of calls for change followed by inaction, and so what changed?

What is different this time after the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings earlier this year?

- I think it's so dispiriting, so tragic that the only time Congress talks about changing our gun laws is after mass shootings.

The fact of the matter is there's a hundred people dying every single day from guns, and we shouldn't wait until there's a mass shooting to talk about national change, but the reality is that these conversations in Washington about changing our gun laws, they do tend to occur after a mass shooting, and while from the outside it looked like we were doing nothing mass shooting after mass shooting, what was actually happening is that we were getting closer to passing something substantial.

After each mass shooting, whether it was Las Vegas, or Orlando, or Parkland, or El Paso, we had a more serious conversation with more Republican partners.

Up until 2022, we never had enough Republican partners in order to pass the law, but we were recruiting more and more year after year.

The gun safety movement was getting stronger and stronger.

It was the moment at which we had achieved such cumulative strength over time that we were finally able to pass something.

We had more volunteers, we had more activists, we had more money on the outside, but we also finally had just enough Republican partners on the inside - after building up those partnerships over 10 years - to get something serious done.

- I think one of the more unexpected parts of the bipartisan bill that you led was going beyond federal law and having those who are convicted for domestic abuse not being able to obtain a firearm, so can you give us more insight into how that got in there and got in the negotiations, and then how it ultimately passed with the bill?

- This is one of the biggest loopholes in existing federal law.

Under the existing law, if you were convicted of any domestic violence crime against your spouse, against your wife, you would have your guns taken away.

But if you were convicted of a domestic violence crime against your girlfriend, or against your domestic partner, there were lots of circumstances in which you could keep your guns.

That makes no sense.

Broadly, Americans, Republicans and Democrats agree that if you're convicted of a domestic violence crime, you should lose your gun rights.

This was a hard thing to get done, because this is a big population of people who have been convicted of crimes against a dating partner, and the gun lobby did not want to lose the ability to sell guns to those people.

But ultimately we had Republicans who were willing to work with us, because they just couldn't go home and explain why they were gonna stand in the way of stopping domestic abusers from getting guns.

I give a lot of credit to Kyrsten Sinema.

Kyrsten Sinema was one of the four negotiating partners.

She was a domestic violence counselor before she went into politics, and so she came to these meetings with these stories of the fear that women lived under, knowing that their dating partner could still keep their guns even after a conviction.

And it was her doggedness at that negotiating table that helped us get that provision into the final law.

- Now the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was signed into law in June, and so what changes in funding are communities gonna start seeing?

I've seen that some of the money has gone out to states to implement or increase mental health services, and so what exactly does that look like for states like Connecticut and around the country?

- The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is known for the changes in gun laws, but it actually has $15 billion in funding for mental health, school and community safety.

$15 billion, people don't really know what those numbers mean in Washington speak.

That's a lot of money, and it's gonna allow us to open up dozens of new mental health clinics all across the country.

It's gonna mean lots of new school counselors, and social workers to help troubled kids, and it's gonna put a lot of money into anti-gun violence initiatives in our cities.

Often initiatives that are targeting these cycles of violence.

That money is being rolled out as we speak, so we're having this conversation in Hartford.

Hartford just got an award from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that is gonna go to community groups that work in the North end and the South end to try to interrupt the cycles of violence.

Schools are about to get new grants from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to hire more counselors.

This money is right now being moved out the door to communities, and it's gonna allow them to wrap services around kids that are in trouble.

Listen, I'm somebody that doesn't believe our gun violence problem is primarily a mental health problem, but there's no doubt that if you get more services to kids in crisis, it will lead to some lower levels of violence, but it'll also just lead to healthier kids and healthier families.

And so the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is a victory just for mental health separate and aside from what it does to try to dampen gun violence rates.

- So what's next?

I mean, the bill doesn't include some major democratic priorities like restoring the federal assault weapons ban, or implementing universal background checks, and so what's the future for further gun reforms?

And I've heard you talk about how movements take time to see all the change they want.

And so how are you going to potentially reassure people that change will eventually come even if it's a while?

- Yeah, there were some naysayers that said you shouldn't give Republicans a win on guns until they're willing to vote for everything - bans on assault weapons, universal background checks.

That's just not how politics work.

It's not how change movements work.

You don't get everything all at once.

You make progress, and you have faith that when people see the results of that progress, they'll want more, and when your opponents vote with you, they will see that the sky doesn't fall.

So, we need to sort of prove that the people that voted for this law on the Republican side can succeed politically.

And I think you saw in the midterm election that voters still have guns as a top of mind issue.

The exit polls in the midterm election show that, by a wide margin, voters want tougher gun laws.

And of those that want tougher gun laws, which is the majority of voters, they were voting broadly for Democrats, and Republicans will see that.

I don't want these gun safety measures to pass with only democratic votes.

I want Republicans to join us, and the midterm election results are proof that it's really hard to win in swing states and swing districts in this country if you're voting against gun safety laws, and that will be a benefit to the movement.

- So what do you see as the future of some of those priorities for you?

I mean, I know it's hard to put a timeline on this, but curious, as alluding to the midterms as you're starting to try to keep or build back majority, just curious what you see as the next thing for that?

- I think you don't necessarily know what's next until opportunity knocks, so we will see what the next step is that Republicans are willing to take, but I think after these midterm elections they will be more willing to engage in conversations about tougher gun laws.

Obviously for me, I want universal background checks, and I still think that that's a pretty easy lift for Republicans.

Comprehensive background checks, saying every gun sale has to come with a background check.

That's supported by 90% of Americans, so it doesn't take a lot of political courage to vote for something that has that kind of public support.

So that would be the place where I would like to continue to push the bipartisan cooperation in.

- Polling has shown that a majority of Americans do want things like universal background checks like we were just talking about.

That's obviously something that hasn't passed yet, but also we've seen surging gun sales since 2020, and there are some Americans who see reforms as infringing on their rights.

So what's the disconnect there and how do you try to break the partisanship on an issue like this?

- Well, there's just a lot of lying that goes on inside the gun industry and the gun lobby.

If you go on to the NRA's social media or their website, you'll see them making these outlandish claims about how Democrats wanna confiscate your weapons and confiscate your ammunition, and so you should load up and buy more before the Democrats come and take it away from you.

All of that is just marketing, and unfortunately it has worked on a very small subset of Americans.

The reality is there's still a much lower percentage of American households that have a gun today than did 20 years ago.

What's happening is that a very small number of Americans are buying lots and lots of weapons.

So today, half the weapons in America, half the weapons in America, are owned by 3% of Americans.

So when you see these numbers of all the guns being sold in this country, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a lot of families that didn't have a gun that were going out and buying a gun.

That's happening to an extent, but really what's happening is that a small number of Americans are just buying more and more and more and more weapons.

Not all of those people are dangerous, but some of them are, and that's what we really have to watch and track.

- While you were serving in the House, your district included Newtown, and then the shooting happened not very long after you were elected to the US Senate, so how has this shaped you and your time in Congress?

- My political career is very much a before and after story from the shooting in Sandy Hook.

I now have this passion project, right, this issue that motivates me every single day.

In part because it happened in my district but also because I've formed relationships since the winter of 2012 with those families in Sandy Hook, but also families in Hartford and New Haven and Bridgeport.

Families that I should have known before Sandy Hook but I now know and count as close friends now, families that lost their sons and daughters to the gun violence that didn't make the national headlines.

So to me, this is an issue that motivates me.

It's an issue that I feel like I've gotta make a difference on, and while I'm very happy that we have finally broken through, we're not done.

We can't rest until we've passed things like universal background checks.

We've gotten these assault weapons off the streets, and I will continue to judge the success of my time in politics by a measure of how well we do in securing the country from the plague of gun violence.

- Senator Murphy, thank you for your time.

- Thank you.

- While it may seem like not much has changed over the past decade, those closest to the Sandy Hook School shooting say progress has been made, but there's still more work to be done.

From Connecticut Public, I'm Walter Smith Randolph.

Thanks for watching "Cutline".

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