Here's how Scarlett Lewis and mothers of mass shootings victims turn their anguish into action —and save lives ForbesOver50
n December 14, 2012, Scarlett Lewis waited at a local firehouse in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, to hear whether her six-year-old son, Jesse, had survived what would later be known as the deadliest school shooting in American history. As the world now knows, 26 people were killed by a lone gunman at the elementary school that day: 20 young students, and six adult staff members.
What’s less surprising than the state of gun violence in America is that Lewis isn’t the only Sandy Hook mom to start campaigning for gun safety. Nicole Hockley, 50, lost her six-year-old son Dylan in the shooting and went on to found Sandy Hook Promise. Kris Brown, 52 and now the president of the Brady Campaign, a leading anti-gun violence group, has friends and colleagues stretching back decades who have lost loved ones to violence.
Kris Brown agrees. “In America, most people I meet are only a few degrees separated from those kinds of stories,” she says. Her childhood was wracked with trauma, she says, when her father died at an early age from brain cancer, causing her mother to lose their home. A lawyer by education, she cut her teeth in gun policy in the early 90s, working with then-Virginia Rep. Jim Moran on Capitol Hill to get the country’s landmark background check legislation, known as the Brady Bill, signed into law.