This is American Life.
From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Ira Glass.
So there's a whole infrastructure that springs into action when a mass shooting happens.
There's the police and SWAT teams, of course, the Red Cross, the Billy Graham prayer truck, therapy dogs.
And there's this couple who shows up, this couple whose daughter died in a mass shooting.
And they come and what they do seems to be very effective.
I don't need to tell you that our government has utterly failed at any kind of response to stop school shootings and mass shootings.
In the wake of that, that nothingness, that non response, parents of children who've died have stepped in in various ways.
Today on our show, we have two stories for you about parents like these.
In the second half hour of our show, we have a dad from Sandy Hook who jumped into action after his son was killed.
Just took extraordinary measures and got results.
But we're gonna begin with this story about that couple, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips.
They're out in Uvalde, Texas this week.
They headed there straight from Buffalo, where of course, 10 people were killed earlier this month in a grocery store.
Their daughter Jessie died back in 2012 when a gunman opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
And since then, they've organized their lives to be able to reach out to other parents like themselves.
We did this story back in 2018 right after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.
But really nothing has changed since we first heard this.
I was re listening to this story this week and one thing that really hit me is how deeply it takes you into the place that I don't know.
Speaking for myself, I find myself thinking about all the time right now, which is what, what the parents and families in Uvalde, Texas are going through.