America’s gun debate itself is the problem, says Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan, six, died in the 2012 school shooting. There’s much more to change than gun laws

After every mass shooting, pundits and politicians ask the same weary question: why can’t the United States pass gun control laws?

Nicole Hockley, whose six-year-old British-born son Dylan died in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, says it’s time to ask a different question.

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In a furious but measured interview less than 48 hours after the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history, in Las Vegas, Hockley said that America’s current gun debate itself is the problem. The endless back and forth between pro-gun and anti-gun views, the narrow focus on gun laws, has created a toxic atmosphere that alienates Americans in the middle and makes the issue seem hopeless.

“People always say, ‘Oh, nothing’s happened, and therefore nothing’s going to happen,’” Hockley said. “For Christ’s sake, why be so defeatist? There are things you can do.

“We’ve tried policy for a few decades now. Try something else. Why keep banging yourself against the wall, doing the same thing and expecting different results?”

Hockley feels it is time to reframe the debate to ask how we can prevent more deaths – without assuming that gun control laws, or focusing solely on guns, is the only answer.

“There’s so much on this issue that we’re not doing,” Hockley said.

Among the options the organization she leads endorses: people can learn how to identify signs of at-risk behavior, and what they can do to intervene effectively. They can advocate for better mental health funding and services, including a better response to childhood trauma and improved access to inpatient psychiatric care. They can work to end stigma around mental health in the media and improve how law enforcement officers respond to people with mental illnesses. They can join a local violence prevention group and help organize a broader grassroots movement, or support local prevention programs.

Americans can also fight for gun control laws at the state level, where there has been progress in the last five years – including a current 20-state push to create “extreme risk protection orders”, something Hockley calls a “brilliant” policy that gives family members of at-risk people a way to petition a court to temporarily bar them from buying guns.

There’s also the legal route to social change, which Hockley and other Sandy Hook families attempted in a lawsuit that sought to hold the gun industry accountable for aggressively marketing and selling the gun used to kill their family members.

“People need to learn and they need to engage,” she said. “Policy takes a long time to change.”

Hockley’s son Dylan, whose father Ian is English, was one of 20 children and six adult educators shot dead in a quiet Connecticut suburb on 12 December 2012. The shooter, Adam Lanza, was a troubled 20-year-old who killed his mother and took her guns before driving to a local school and killing 26 people with a military-style rifle. Investigators later concluded that he had struggled with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, and that he had been obsessed with mass murder, particularly the 1999 school shooting at Columbine high school in Colorado.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dylan Hockley, aged six, was killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Some of Dylan’s classmates had been able to run to safety when the shooter paused to reload, Nicole was told, but Dylan had not escaped. He had died in the arms of his classroom aide, Anne Marie Murphy, who was also killed. A photo of six-year-old Dylan grinning in his Superman T-shirt has become an icon of the fight to prevent gun violence, and has been displayed repeatedly on the floor of Congress.

Only weeks after her son was killed, Nicole joined other Sandy Hook parents to go to Washington and lobby senators to support a bill to expand background checks on gun sales as part of Barack Obama’s major push to prevent future shootings. A majority of senators supported the legislation, but in April 2013, four months after the attack, it failed to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a potential filibuster. Other gun control bills, including a proposed assault weapon ban, failed as well.

Watching the background check legislation be defeated was “soul-crushing”, Hockley has said. She had visited senators and seen them weep as she shared Dylan’s story, and then saw some of those same senators vote against the bill.

Today, Hockley is still fighting for some kind of gun control legislation. But after studying the history of social change movements over the past 30 years, she has concluded that the entire attempt to change America’s gun violence problem is being done backwards. Passing laws and policies “is one of the levers you pull after you’ve already created behavioral and attitudinal change”.

Hockley said she grew up with the idea of assigning a “designated driver” when a group of friends went out drinking. “Those two words changed behavior,” she said. “They changed the attitudes over drinking and driving, and they changed actions, and as a result, that saved God knows how many lives.”

There were legal and technological changes that went along with this social shift: police measuring blood alcohol levels, laws that regulated teen driving. But the central fight wasn’t over a “designated driver” policy, she said. “It’s a social change, and that’s what we’re missing on gun violence prevention.”

Sandy Hook Promise, the group Hockley and other family members of Sandy Hook victims founded after the shooting, has attempted to carve out a different, less-polarized space within the gun violence conversation, running training programs to help students and adults recognize at-risk behavior that might lead to school violence, as well as advocating for some kinds of gun control legislation.

The group has never endorsed a ban on assault weapons, a popular policy among Democrats, though it does supporting limiting the size of ammunition magazines.

Though Hockley has very strong feelings about the AR-15-style gun used to murder Dylan, she and other Sandy Hook Promise members decided there were other battles to fight that would save many more lives than focusing on a weapons ban.

“Those people – I hear them, I understand then – [who say] we should do what happened in Dunblane [in the UK] or Australia, ban all the guns, I understand that passion, I understand that anger, but that is not a practical solution for our country,” she said.

“America has a history of gun ownership. The second amendment is iron-clad,” she said.

“Let’s focus on what we can do instead, rather than keep butting heads. This is an issue that people get into massive arguments about, and if you’re arguing, then you’re not listening to the other person, you’re not going to be able to find a way forward.”

In the nearly five years since her son’s murder, Hockley has watched America’s mass shooting attacks grow larger and larger, claiming more lives and leaving more families bereft. When the Guardian spoke to her last year after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, she said she was frustrated that change was so slow, that education about how to identify the signs of someone at risk had not spread faster. Almost always, she says, there are missed red flags before a shooting, people who were told, action that could have been taken. But the shootings keep happening, and each time, she has to listen to the same talking points and arguments replay and replay again.

In a Sandy Hook Promise statement on Monday that Hockley and others wrote, the group assailed how Americans “generally respond (or don’t) as a country to mass shootings like Las Vegas”, and described their frustration at the “cyclical conversation, starting with debate between banning assault weapons or arming more Americans, moving then to a focus on mental illness and ‘good guys vs bad guys’ and finally to policy proposals that may relate directly to what occurred, but possibly not, and no federal legislation changes will pass.

“By the end of next week this story will be almost gone as if it never happened, even while those most impacted are still reeling from shock and grief,” they wrote.

“If we keep this cyclical argument, and say, ‘Keep the guns away!’ ‘Give them more guns!’, there’s no way for people who are in the country, who don’t want to get involved in this huge horrible angry fight, but just want to protect themselves and their families and their kids … to engage,” Hockley said in an interview on Tuesday.

The conversation after mass shootings is always focused on the two polarized sides of the gun control debate, she said, but people shouldn’t “have to make a choice between the second amendment and gun control” in order to get involved.

Hockley said she was tired of arguments of whether to focus on “the shooter” or “the gun”, when it’s obvious that both need attention. If gun control laws can’t be passed right away, she said, there are many other avenues to prevent shootings, from grassroots organizing, to supporting violence prevention programs, to threat assessment training, to using lawsuits to attack the problem.

“As a country, we’re too good at putting a Band-Aid on a problem and saying, ‘There, we’ve fixed it,’ or dealing with imminent danger,” she said.

Take the American schools that are now making their students participate in “active shooter” drills to prepare them for an attack.

“We’re teaching people to run and hide from an active shooter. Why don’t we focus on what prevents that shooting from happening in the first place?”

Hockley said she does not want to criticize anyone who is actually involved in trying to prevent gun violence, no matter what strategies they have chosen to prioritize. “The true problem on this issue is apathy. That’s on the people who don’t get involved. That’s on people like myself, more than five years ago.

“People get hopeless and helpless. They sit back and say, ‘I guess that’s just the price of living in America. That is something I do not accept.’ Death by firearm is not a right as an American citizen. We can prevent this.”

In response to Donald Trump’s comments on the Las Vegas shooter being “evil”, Sandy Hook Promise had offered a response that put more responsibility of Americans as a whole.

“Nobody is born evil. Nobody is born a killer. They are influenced by the environment around them,” Hockley and others wrote.

“If you’re doing nothing, you are part of the problem, not the solution,” she told me.