Sandy Hook Promise offers roadmap for future without school shootings after attack at Colorado high school
By Spencer Wilson
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DENVER, Colorado (KCNC) — After yet another Colorado school shooting, Nicole Hockley of Sandy Hook Promise’s message carries both grief and urgency. Her youngest son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre more than a decade ago. Within weeks, she co-founded non-profit Sandy Hook Promise with one mission: to stop other families from enduring what she lives with every day.
“This is exhausting,” Hockley said in an interview with CBS Colorado following the Evergreen High School shooting. “I think one of the most exhausting things about this is that these acts are preventable. We have the solutions that we know work, and sometimes we just don’t have the will to make them happen.”
Since its founding, Sandy Hook Promise has trained millions of students and educators nationwide to recognize warning signs of violence. Hockley says those efforts have prevented more than 1,000 youth suicides and stopped at least 18 planned school shootings.
For her, the work is proof that prevention is possible; if people choose to act.
“We should be feeling this and saying, ‘This is unacceptable,'” Hockley said. “This is not the way America should be. There is a way to prevent these tragedies, and we need to move past normalizing this or being desensitized. None of us wants this to happen in our community, so why do we accept it when it happens to someone else?”
Hockley said the conversation should not pit mental health against gun safety. The organization says that you cannot stop these attacks without both focuses.
“There is an escalating pathway to violence that often starts with isolation or rejection,” Hockley explained. “But then you couple that with access to a weapon, and that’s when you have the tragedy. This is about the combination.”
Colorado, she noted, is on the right track with its anonymous reporting system, which allows students to safely speak up when they see warning signs. It’s the kind of tool Sandy Hook Promise advocates for: practical, bipartisan and designed to save lives.
For Hockley, the fight is as personal as it gets. She admits the rage and grief of Sandy Hook never leave her, but she channels them into a single mission, keeping children safe.
“Our kids don’t have the politics. They just want to be safe in their schools, homes and communities,” she said. “We adults have a duty to respond to that.”
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