"We have to be persistent:" Sandy Hook mother demands continued action in wake of Texas school shooting
Nelba Márquez-Greene said she received a text advising her to avoid reading or watching the news on Tuesday, when a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school left 19 children and two adults dead. Marquez-Greene, who was a mother of one of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, said she re-lived the tragic day she lost her child in 2012 upon learning of Tuesday's tragedy in Texas.
"The agony that you face and the survival that you have to do in order to get through something like this, we are asking for super human strength from these parents," she told "CBS Mornings."
Márquez-Greene, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist, called for meaningful action to be taken in regards to gun violence following the deadly incident in Texas, which is the 27th shooting to occur at a school so far in 2022, according to Education Week.
She's made it her mission to educate people on how to best support grieving families and challenging legislators who she says are "gaslighting in every other way and deciding to be cowards."
"We don't need more cowardice now, we need courage and we need much more courage from them," she told CBS Mornings. "We have to meet their cowardice, their complacency, with outrage and demanding action. We have to meet them. We have to be persistent."
Márquez-Greene said people don't think about issues related to gun reform "unless there's a national incident," and advocated for continued action to be taken.
"The truth is, 120+ families are impacted by gun violence every day," she said. "If we broadcast that, then maybe it would stay in our minds, but we forget so easily."
The therapist advised those trying to support families grieving in wake of the incident to "make a commitment to being there for those families not just today, not just next week, but 10 and 15 and 20 years from now because it will still feel like shards of glass decades later."