President Joe Biden on Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which saw a gunman kill 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old.
“Today, those first-graders should be sitting in eleventh-grade classrooms, planning for their high school graduation and all the possibilities ahead,” Biden wrote in a proclamation on Wednesday. “Those educators should be preparing lessons for new groups of students and enjoying full lives surrounded by their loved ones.”
“Instead, their desks are forever empty, their families are left with holes in their hearts, and our Nation is missing a piece of its soul,” the president continued.
“As we remember and grieve those victims and their families, we acknowledge the pain that the community of Newtown continues to endure,” Biden wrote. “That horrific day changed the lives of every survivor, many of whom still carry physical and emotional wounds”
The incident — the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history and the deadliest at a U.S. elementary school — rocked the nation while Biden was serving as vice president. After the shooting, he was tasked with leading a gun violence task force charged with making recommendations to then-President Barack Obama to address gun violence nationwide.
But despite protests, demonstrations and repeated calls for action to address gun violence, gun safety legislation failed in the months after the Sandy Hook shooting, leaving activists and advocates frustrated.
It wasn’t until roughly a decade later — in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York — that Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major gun safety legislation in decades.
The bill, signed into law in June, boosts funding for state red flag laws, mental health support and other crisis intervention measures, enhances background checks for gun buyers under 21, and narrows the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” which prevents people convicted of domestic abuse from owning a gun.
The two U.S. senators from Connecticut – Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy – gave emotional speeches on the chamber floor on Wednesday to mark the 10th anniversary.
"I wish I could tell you that the knifelike sorrow and pain has subsided, but the fact is it is still raw and real," Blumenthal said. "It reminds us of the need to honor those 26 lives with action."
"Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among American children and teens," he added.
"But the survivors and the loved ones have become the difference-maker," Blumenthal said, crediting the "momentum" from those groups for culminating in the gun bill passed this summer but also urging more "common sense" reforms that most Americans support.
Murphy, who as a congressman represented Newtown when the shooting took place in 2012, said he and Blumenthal have given "hundreds" of speeches about Sandy Hook and gun violence, urging change.
"There's nothing that we can say that explains through words the feeling of cataclysmic loss when you lose a child," he said.
"My sorrow today is for the fact that it took Sandy Hook to take this country up to what had been happening in front of every single day," Murphy added.
Yet the senator said Americans should not think of the anniversary as just about sadness and grief for the Sandy Hook families, but also about joy.
"A lot of joy for what we have found that lies inside each of us, right? Out of Sandy Hook came kindness and grace," he said.
In addition to the bipartisan gun safety law, President Biden, through executive action, has cracked down on ghost guns — firearms that are unserialized, untraceable and can be purchased online and assembled privately — and appointed the first Senate-confirmed director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives since 2015.
Still, Biden said, “we must do more” to address the scourge of gun violence.
“We should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem,” the president charged in a separate statement. “We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again. We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul ten years ago to turn their pain into purpose.”
“I am determined to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines like those used at Sandy Hook and countless other mass shootings in America,” Biden said. “Enough is enough.”
“Our obligation is clear,” the president added. “We must eliminate these weapons that have no purpose other than to kill people in large numbers. It is within our power to do this – for the sake of not only the lives of the innocents lost, but for the survivors who still hope.”
Biden's words were similar to the sentiments he expressed last week at the National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence, an annual event formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy. Biden was introduced by Sandy Hook survivor Jackie Hegarty, 17, who was in second grade on the day of the shooting.
“At the time, I was only seven years old. I heard and saw things no child, no person, should ever have to see,” Hegarty said at the event. “The last 10 years have not been easy. But living my life honoring the victims has helped…guns are now the number one killer of children in America, and we are asked to be brave while hiding under our desks in our classrooms, while too many elected officials lack the courage to pass common sense laws to save our lives.”
“Together, we made some important progress, the most significant gun law passed in 30 years, but it’s still not enough,” Biden said at the vigil. “Even as our work continues to limit the number of bullets that can be in a (magazine) the type of weapons that can be purchased and sold, the attempt to ban assault weapons, a whole range of things that are just simple common sense.
"Ten years ago today, 20 first-graders and 6 educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 26 families and the entire Newtown community still feel that unthinkable pain and unimaginable loss every day," Vice President Kamala Harris wrote on Twitter. "Let us continue to honor their lives with action to end gun violence."
"The tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school 10 years ago took 26 beautiful lives. I will never forget the children and educators lost that day – their genius and love robbed from all of us," New Jersey Democrat Sen. Cory Booker wrote on Twitter, alongside images of the victims. "We continue the work to make sure no family knows this pain."
Former President Obama wrote in a statement that the shooting was "the single darkest day" of his tenure in the White House.
"The news from Sandy Hook Elementary was devastating, a visceral blow, and like so many others, I felt not just sorrow but anger at a world that could allow such things to happen," he wrote.
"Ten years ago, we all would have understood if those families had simply asked for privacy and closed themselves off from the world. But instead, they took unimaginable sorrow and channeled it into a righteous cause – setting an example of strength and resolve," Obama continued. "They've made us proud. And if they were here today, I know the children and educators we lost a decade ago today would be proud, too."
"Words cannot capture the agony and outrage of this monstrous rampage, which robbed innocent children of their futures and left their loved ones forever shattered," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote of the shooting. "Tragically, these wounds were again reopened earlier this year by the elementary school massacre in Uvalde – a brutal reminder that, a decade later, a gun violence crisis continues to steal our precious children."
“In the decade since Newtown, countless more communities across the country have been scarred by the daily carnage of gun violence," she added. "Today, and every day, let us reaffirm our resolve to stop the bloodshed and build a safer world for our children.”
Spectrum News' Austin Landis and David Mendez contributed to this report.