In the first months after the Newtown shooting, much of the families’ advocacy work centered on gun control, particularly a failed effort in 2013 to get a federal law banning some semi-automatic weapons and expanding criminal and mental background checks for gun purchases. The vast majority of people don’t go into schools and shoot them up,” Vogl said. “If I can’t stay optimistic I need to quit and find something else to do. The effort was launched after the Newtown attack by Hensel and her husband, Jeremy Richman, who died by suicide in 2019. It’s brutal because it triggers some of the darkest memories we have,” said Vogl, executive director at the National Mental Health Innovation Center in Colorado, where the program is based. Like the Newtown gunman, the attacker in Texas was a young man who shot an older family member he lived with before opening fire with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle inside a nearby elementary school, slaughtering small and defenseless children.Īs details of Tuesday’s shooting emerged, Matt Vogl was texting with Jennifer Hensel, whose daughter Avielle was killed in Newtown, and others involved in an advocacy effort named in the girl’s honor, the Avielle Initiative, which promotes efforts to make mental health care more widely available through technology.
