Anger, anguish among Parkland and Newtown families after Texas shooting

Alex Wind learned about it on a bus trip to New York, where he was headed to attend a wedding and take a break from the daily fight for gun reform he’s sought since he hid in a Parkland, Fla., classroom closet, listening to the gunshots that ended 17 lives.The tears and nausea and breath-stripping pain would come for all of them in the hours ahead, but for Hockley, the numbness arrived first.“How are you doing?” asked her Sandy Hook Promise co-founder, Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son was also killed in the Connecticut shooting.“I just feel empty,” Hockley told him.At least 19 children, 2 teachers killed at Texas elementary schoolShe had endured what so many families in Uvalde, Tex., were about to face. The aftermath felt familiar, too: the panic in the parents’ eyes and the hollowness in the students’; the conservative politicians arguing that only more guns would keep children safe in schools and the liberal ones insisting that more guns had never kept children safe in schools.Little had changed after he lived through all that four years ago, and he was skeptical that much would change after watching it this time.If there was any consolation, it was the fresh questions about his son. She refuses to let the school move on.“There are no words,” he said, pausing, “except the same words as the time before that and the time before that and the time before that.”Like the others, and like President Biden, Wind believed that progress wouldn’t happen until conservative lawmakers defied the gun lobbyists who for decades have opposed even widely popular reforms.It was a frustration that no one expressed more clearly on Tuesday than Fred Guttenberg, another Parkland parent, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed four years ago.