Start getting out there and connecting and helping other people. Positive action is the opposite of anxiety and fear. And I’ve got to tell you, it feels really good when you stop railing against our government and start taking responsibility, knowing that you’re the solution, that there’s something that you can do. If I have to say that, it’s pretty obvious. Tired old rhetoric that talked about Sandy Hook. Scarlett Lewis’ message to grieving Uvalde parents: “Every individual in America has a broken heart right now for your loss.” Photo by Jackie Ricciardi Lewis discussed the Texas shooting on her drive back from a talk to high schoolers in New Hampshire, her tone sounding exasperated with people and leaders who, she says, won’t avert tragedies with long-proven strategies. In Uvalde, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos is believed to have been killed by law enforcement officers after shooting dead 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School May 24.
He commited suicide as first responders closed in.) Lewis started a foundation, the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, that offers a free SEL curriculum to schools nationally and globally. (Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza was a recluse with a sensory disorder and a mother, whom he also killed that day, who exposed him to guns. The unhealable hole in her heart made her an unstoppable evangelist for social and emotional learning ( SEL), which, she’s convinced, would have prevented Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and other massacres. Stiffening gun safety laws, while important, skirts the education and role-modeling for children that are the only cure for gun violence, Lewis tells BU Today. So not only does Lewis know firsthand their pain, she knows what will come next. There are very few people in this country, or world, who know intimately the heartache that the families in Uvalde, Tex., are experiencing right now.Īlmost 10 years ago, Lewis (COM’90) lost her first grader, Jesse, when he, along with 19 other students and 6 educators, were murdered in 2012 by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.