Washington, D.C.—Today, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) released the following statement on the ten-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. In June, prior to passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, Senator Casey authored an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining how the Sandy Hook massacre changed his thinking around gun violence and urged his colleagues to pass the first commonsense gun safety legislation in more than three decades.
“Today marks the ten-year anniversary of the one of the darkest days in our Nation’s history. I was forever changed by the horror of Sandy Hook. After I learned of the deaths of 20 elementary school students and six of their teachers, I was struck by the stark realization that we did not have to live like this. So I changed my position on gun safety laws.
“Yet it took thousands more mass shootings and hundreds of thousands of gun violence deaths for Congress to finally act. This past summer, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle finally came to the table to pass a commonsense gun safety bill. That law will save lives. But it has to be the beginning of our work on this issue. People are still being killed and injured by gun violence every day in cities and communities across our Commonwealth and the Nation. We owe it to the families of the 26 souls who lost their lives in Sandy Hook—and to every single American who has ever lost a loved one or been traumatized because of gun violence—to get up every single day and fight to end the scourge of gun violence once and for all.”
