Five years on, Sandy Hook families recall gun horror – but is anyone listening in Washington?

Newtown shooting shocked the world – yet gun control seems further away than ever. But a band of loyal activists are convinced the fight is winnable

When concerned families from Newtown, Connecticut, first came to Washington five years ago, every door was open.

This year, the room they had reserved for a press-conference on Capitol Hill was double-booked. They were shifted to a room half the size and only a single TV camera showed up to cover the emotional stories of dozens of gun violence survivors who had flown in from across the country.

Members of Congress only agreed to set up meetings with their direct constituents, and many simply offered a briefing with a staffer. The only lawmakers who spoke at the annual vigil to honor gun violence victims were from Connecticut.

Sandy Hook has become synonymous with a cynicism about America’s escalating gun violence problem; if Americans could not pass stricter gun laws after 20 children were shot dead in their elementary school classrooms, then they would never act.

But Newtown’s activists have not given up. On Wednesday, a week before the fifth anniversary of the shooting, a group of more than 40 local residents and their allies met in the early morning darkness behind the Newtown Municipal Center. They boarded a bus to Washington DC with snacks and pillows and stacks of pamphlets, some of them carrying the more formal clothes they would wear to the Capitol.

In the darkness, one volunteer moved through the aisle, handing out homemade gingerbread muffins and slices of coffee cake baked by a neighbor who had not been able to come on the trip.

The activists on the bus were not the parents of the 20 children and six educators killed. They were friends and neighbors and a few survivors, people who described how the horror of the shooting rippling outwards through the whole community, permanently changed them.

There was Gina McDade, who had lived near the shooter and his mother. “I knew her as a mother and there were no signs that anything was wrong,” McDade said. “We can’t round up every angry kid. What we can control is guns.”

The morning of the shooting in 2012, McDade had seen lines of Swat cars moving into her neighborhood. Six of the families who had lost their loved ones also lived in that same area, not far from where the shooter had lived. Each family was assigned a law enforcement detail. Even before the names of the victims had been publicly announced, “you saw the state trooper car in the driveway and you knew”.

There was Kari Hulgaard, whose daughter, just before the massacre, had danced the Nutcracker with some of the kids from Sandy Hook, and Janice Bernard, who works in the children’s section of the local library, and seen the parents finally come in after the shooting, their faces still stunned and disbelieving.

And there was Jackson Mittleman, 11 at the time, who had been in a school two miles away from Sandy Hook when the shooting happened. All he knew, at first, was that his school had gone into lockdown while he was in orchestra class. He put his violin aside and huddled with his classmates under and around the teacher’s desk. They stayed there for hours.

Mittleman has vivid memories of the rest of that day: an early television report saying that at least 18 people were dead in a shooting at an elementary school just two miles from his school. Seeing two parents he knew, the Pozners, in the kitchen of a friend’s house. The Pozners had three kids who were students at Sandy Hook. They were just sitting there, saying nothing.

Watching TV in the basement with his siblings that night as the president of the United States talked about what had happened in their town.

The brutality of the attack shocked the world. In less than 11 minutes, a 20-year-old local man obsessed with mass shootings had burst into a Connecticut elementary school with an AR-15-style rifle and murdered 20 young children and six educators, including the school’s principal.

Newtown was deluged with donations and calls and hand-drawn cards, as well as tens of thousands of teddy bears. When Mittleman went back to his school on Monday, there was a Swat team waiting outside. The streets of Newtown filled with news trucks, and on at least one day, news trucks and hearses. McDade opened her door to a single news reporter and in minutes found herself lit by the glare of television lights.

“It still felt like it was happening for a while,” Mittleman said.

Local residents said it took about year for Newtown for feel anything close to normal, and that it’s still not quite back yet.

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As the sun rose on the bus to Washington, Po Murray, the chairman of the Newtown Action Alliance, which organized the trip, rallied the women at the front of the bus. “Can I put you ladies to work?” she asked. “Here are the staplers.”

The volunteers begin working through the stacks of form letters to legislators, to be stapled delivered in person over the next two days.

Later, Murray talked through the four current gun bills the group supported and they two they opposed.

“It’s like doing a high school project,” a volunteer quipped.

“Lobbying for dummies,” someone said.

Since Donald Trump, the National Rifle Association’s chosen candidate, won the White House, backed by more than $30m in support from the NRA, an already uphill battle for gun control laws has become even harder.

After a mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, a White House spokeswoman emphasize the importance of not passing gun control laws.

As the gun control campaigners arrived in Washington, after years of preparation, House Republicans were poised to vote on the NRA’s “no 1 legislative priority.” The federal law would tear down local restrictions and requirements for carrying guns in public, and make it possible for tourists from other states to carry their guns in Los Angeles restaurants or on the New York City subway, and for residents of states with strict gun laws to simply shop around for an easier state to issue them a gun-carrying permit.

Local police chiefs across the country lined up against the bill, saying it would be an enforcement nightmare for officers on the street. Republicans, in contrast, argued that the policy would only make America safer, by making it easier for armed citizens to confront violent threats.

The vote on this NRA-backed “concealed carry reciprocity” bill had been scheduled for the same day the Newtown group arrived in Washington for their annual vigil, which Democratic lawmakers criticized as shameful and insulting.

The Newtown bus pulled up at the Capitol, and advocates hurried up the steps towards a patch of grass in front of the House of Representatives. Those protesting the NRA’s attempt to eviscerate local gun control laws included gun violence survivors from Chicago, the sister of the school psychologist killed at Sandy Hook, family members of people who had used guns to kill themselves, and women who had escaped domestic violence.

For survivors who had been shot themselves, the risk of the law was particularly immediate: domestic violence survivors in particular often move to states with tougher gun laws to protect themselves, said Maj Sabrina Tapp-Harper of the Baltimore city sheriff’s department. This law would undo their protections.

That same day, thousands of protesters pushing to restore legal protections for young undocumented immigrants had massed on the steps of the Capitol, leading to almost 200 arrests. But most of America’s gun control groups have yet to embrace civil disobedience. The gun control protest against the NRA’s number one priority piece of legislation was small and decorous. There was a careful selection of more pro-gun advocates of gun control, including a rancher from New Mexico in a cowboy hat and a former rear admiral from the US Navy.

Tiffany Starr, who had come to Washington from New Jersey for her first day of gun violence prevention advocacy, had tried to sway a vote on the NRA-backed bill. Her congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen, was a vulnerable Republican facing re-election next year. He had been targeted by a gun control group with ads urging him to vote against the NRA bill.

Starr and a fellow survivor met with one of Frelinghuysen’s staffers and shared their stories as gun violence survivors. Starr’s father had been killed in 1994 when her sister’s abusive ex-boyfriend shot his way into their house looking for her. Their father had pushed her sister out of the way, and then been shot himself, giving his wife and daughters just enough time to run and hide in a neighbor’s house.

Frelinghuysen’s staffer listened politely. The meeting was “short and sweet” but the experience was “very depressing,” Starr said. Two survivors had explained why the law would make them feel unsafe, they had described their terrible, first-hand experiences of gun violence. But there still didn’t seem to be any opening for reconsidering the lawmaker’s position.

Starr and a group of other survivors had gone through several Capitol metal detectors and into the gallery overlooking the House floor to watch the vote on the NRA bill.

The women looked down on the sea of blue and gray suits, the silver hair of the hundreds of white men of the House of Representatives, the scattered red suits and dresses of the female members.

“I’m pretty sure” that Frelinghuysen’s voting yes to support the NRA’s bill, Starr said. The women were staring at the screens showing the vote count on the bill. “I think the vote’s done. I think it’s done. He did vote yes,” she said.

The concealed carry bill had advanced to the Senate, where it was seen as unlikely to get very far, by a margin of 231-198.

“What I want to know is why it’s so noisy,” Teresa Piliero said, as they got up to go.

The chatter on the House floor, as members milled about, talking to each other, had gone on unabated as the NRA bill passed.

Newtown residents were still pushing through the halls of Congress on Thursday, weary staffers listening to their pitch, as the news broke of another school shooting, this one in New Mexico. Three students, including the shooter, were dead. It was such a small school shooting, in a day of scandal and resignation in Washington and fires in California, that it barely registered on the news.

Small shootings now were met with resignation. Trump had said, after the Las Vegas shooting, that “we pray for the day when evil is banished and the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear,” but gun control advocates were tired of thoughts and prayers and losing votes.

The NRA’s push for its guns-everywhere bill was winning in Washington, but it had started the fight three decades earlier in the states, where advocates had succeeded in liberalizing laws for gun carrying, one state at a time. Gun control advocates have more recently made the same strategic move to the states, and there they were seeing small victories.

Chris Hurst, the boyfriend of Alison Parker, a journalist who had been shot to death on live television in 2015, had decided to quit his own job as a reporter and run for state office in Virginia against an NRA-backed opponent. He had won. In his speech to other gun violence prevention advocates at a vigil, Hurst praised another survivor who was now running for state office in Georgia: Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, a black teenager who had been shot to death by a white man after the man told him he was playing his music too loudly at a gas station.

All night, advocates kept coming up to Hurst, exclaiming “Wow!” and offering hugs.

Asked what advice he had for fellow survivors who wanted to run for office, Hurst said: “Trust in your strength.”