On December 14th, 2012, Nelba Marquez-Greene lost her 6-year-old daughter in the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. So Nelba and her husband, Jimmy Greene, know what the families of the victims of the Las Vegas shooting are going through.
“I don’t know what to say besides this is on every congressperson who said in ’13: There is simply nothing we could do,” she wrote on Twitter. “You don’t recover from this — as a mother, brother, father. You manage. But there is no recovery. I am heartbroken.”
“Today you got 50+ new reasons I take a knee. My heart, my prayers, my ACTIONS are with the victim families,” she wrote. Since the horrific 2012 events in Newtown, Nelba and Jimmy have become gun safety advocates, pressuring members of Congress to do something to try and prevent future tragedies such as Sandy Hook, and yes, the Las Vegas incident. On Twitter, she continued, “Every day, I am stunned by the level of trauma (direct and vicarious) congress is willing to make us suffer through,” indicating that legislators have failed to protect the citizens of this country from such mass shootings.
Finally, Nelba posted a touching video of her 6-year-old daughter playing and singing at the piano, showing us that this is a real problem that happens to real families.
As a final thought & reminder to @MooreSenate & congress, this is the little girl u said I should’ve prayed “harder” for. #Newtown #LasVegas pic.twitter.com/vwLg22GwG8
— Nelba Márquez-Greene (@Nelba_MG) October 2, 2017
But Congress has yet to do the work Nelba and so many others are calling for. After the Sandy Hook shooting, Senator Chris Murphy became a proponent of gun safety measures. He spoke for 15 hours on the Senate floor once, but still nothing passed through the legislature. Following the Las Vegas events, he released a statement.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.”
Source: John Moore/Getty Images North America
