It's the days, weeks, months, and years spent missing them.

We will never stop missing them.
We will never stop loving them.
We will never stop fighting for them.
💚🤍

This movement is about love. Love for our friends, for our family, for the children we have yet to have. For those of us from Newtown, it’s also about the love we still have for our friends and teachers who we lost that day. It’s the love we still have for them that keeps their memories alive.

But remember that’s how far too many families have felt, putting their kids on the bus to school, dropping them off at the mall, or taking them to church, not knowing that was the last time they'd see them. Hold your loved ones close today.

Over the course of today alone, 5x the number of people who passed at Sandy Hook will be killed by guns.

For those not from Newtown, it’s easy to think of gun violence as some abstract issue that will never affect you. Something that only happens in cities, or in tragedies hundreds of miles away.

No one expects to lose someone to gun violence. But every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans experience the unexpected. In the time it’s taken you to read this, someone across America has likely passed from gun violence.

I remember the tears in my mom’s eyes when she ran up to me after I evacuated the school, happy to know that her baby boy was even alive. And I remember the walk my parents took me on the next day when they told me I would never see my friends again.

I remember the minutes that seemed like hours as we hid, confused and scared. I remember seeing police officers with their weapons drawn, being marched out of school in lines, being told to cover my eyes so I couldn’t see the carnage.