Victims' families push for more gun safety laws: "The gun could have been stored in the time it takes you to take one breath"
The decision to charge the alleged gunman's parents with involuntary manslaughter in the Oxford, Michigan, school shooting has brought new attention to laws surrounding children's access to firearms.
Gun safety advocates want gun owners to be held criminally responsible in the event they fail to properly secure firearms. Members of the medical community are pushing for more funding to treat gun injuries and deaths as a public health emergency.
Parents who lost children to firearms are also speaking out about the devastation that is brought by gun injury and death.
Gwen Lacroix's son, Jonah, shot and killed himself with an unsecured gun, something Lacroix said she was afraid of for a long time because Jonah struggled with his mental health.
The gun Jonah accessed was registered to Lacroix's then-husband, who confirmed to CBS News that it was stored unlocked and unloaded, in a separate part of the house from the bullets—which is in compliance with Michigan law.
"I didn't fight hard enough. I didn't take a stand and say, 'There are not gonna be any unlocked guns in my home,'" Lacroix told CBS News' senior medical correspondent Dr. Tara Narula.
Narula spoke with a trauma surgeon at the center of that push, along with three parents, including Lacroix, who lost children to firearms. All four described the tremendous ripple effects, including the significant disability and chronic injuries that come from non-fatal firearm injuries and the psychological damage to entire communities and families, including thoughts of suicide and despair.
According to data from CDC, firearms are the leading cause of death ages one to 19. Two-thirds of those deaths are by suicide. It's estimated 13 million kids in the U.S. live in a home with at least one firearm.
Kristin Song had no idea why her son, Ethan, was taken to the emergency room.
"Waiting for the ER doctor to come in, we had no idea Ethan had been shot. I thought he had gotten hit by a car," she said.
Ethan had accidentally shot and killed himself at his friend's house. Song said that the two teenagers were posting themselves on social media holding a gun on a fake account.
"The detective said, 'There was probably a hundred kids who knew your son and his best friend were playing with guns and said nothing,'" Song said.
Following Ethan's death in 2018, the Song family successfully lobbied for a Connecticut state law strengthening requirements around safe storage of firearms in homes.
Opponents in the state legislature called Ethan's Law "too broad." But it passed with bipartisan support and a federal version has been introduced.
"It's just asking basically to step up and make sure that people cannot get a hold of unsecured guns. Eight children a day are dying because they've gained access to a gun," Song said.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia have passed child access prevention laws like Ethan's Law. A similar measure was working its way through the Michigan legislature at the time of the Oxford school shooting.
Mark Barden, co-founder and CEO of Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund, lost his son, Daniel, in the Newtown shooting. He said that gun safety isn't on most parents radar.
"I think it depends on where you live. There are families who live with this every day and it's part of their reality and unfortunately, they're not getting the support and the attention and the services that those of us who have suffered high-profile tragedies," Barden said.
For more than 20 years, federally funded research into gun injury prevention was prohibited. In 2019, Congress lifted that ban.
Dr. Sathya was among the first to receive the National Institutes of Health funding to study the root causes of gun injury and death.
"If you look at the leading causes of death, whether they be heart disease, motor vehicle collisions, cancer, firearms have always been at the top and they receive less than 1% of the funding," Sathya said.
Sathya said normalizing conversations around gun safety and screening of firearm access may help get "guns locked."
"If you screen positive for violence risk, you're gonna get violence interrupters, community resources to hopefully break that cycle of violence," he said.
Song said she has no problem with people owning guns but has a problem with "negligent and reckless behavior."
Lacroix added that she would like there "be consequences for gun owning adults who allow children to get ahold of their guns and either hurt themselves or someone else."
Barden says most gun owners he speaks to identify as "responsible gun owners."
The three parents believe that proper gun storage could have helped prevent their tragedies.
"All three of our situations, the gun could have been stored in the time it takes you to take one breath," Song said.
Sandy Hook Promise created the Say Something program which "teaches middle and high school students to recognize the warning signs of someone at-risk of hurting themselves or others and how to say something to a trusted adult to get help."
"School shootings, mass casualty events that someone says something over social media or in passing to somebody in school," Barden said. "If that individual is trained in our Say Something program, they know exactly what to do and they can tell a trusted adult who can get that person help."
For parents of those lost to gun violence, it's not just about statistics and numbers.
"I always have pictures of my little Daniel. To look at the face of my sweet, little seven-year-old boy who was innocently in his first-grade classroom when he was shot to death," Barden said.
"My youngest James was three when Jonah died and he doesn't remember him. It's very difficult to grow up and not have your big brother to guide you," Lacroix said.
Sathya, who works as a pediatric trauma surgeon, has had to walk into waiting rooms and deliver the news to families.
"I mean, this is, you know, a preventable crisis that we are doing nothing about. It makes you feel helpless," he said.
Sandy Hook Promise offers a safe firearm storage checklist, that can be found on their website.
