Parents of Sandy Hook Victims Speak Out After Oregon College Shooting

The parents of two young children killed in the Sandy Hook tragedy speaking out about doing more nationwide to prevent future school shootings after another deadly mass shooting at an Oregon community college and they're offering words of comfort for the victims' families.

At least nine people were killed and nine others injured when a gunman opened fire in a classroom at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The shooter, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, 26, a student enrolled in the writing class where the mass shooting happened, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Sandy Hook parents Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley empathize with the families of the victims in Oregon. They experienced similar losses when their children, Daniel Barden, 7, and Dylan Hockley, 6, were killed in a school shooting massacre along with 24 others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012. The shooter also shot and killed his mother before ultimately taking his own life.

"Our hearts break for the shattered families and community of Umpqua Community College after yesterday’s horror," Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley said in a statement Friday. "We understand their pain now and in the days and years to come and we promise to support them in any way possible. Our thoughts remain with them, the loved ones killed, those injured, and the countless traumatized."

Barden and Hockley are managing directors of Sandy Hook Promise, a national movement of parents, schools and community organizations engaged and empowered to deliver gun violence prevention programs and mobilize for the passage of sensible state and national policy," according to the website.

"While our hearts continue to break, our spirit never will. Nor will our anger in knowing that this was yet another preventable tragedy," Barden and Hockley said. "We know that as we learn facts about this tragedy, our nation will once again enter the endless debate around gun control and gun freedom. The debate goes on, but our children need us now. What saddens us is that we also know that, as usual, facts will come to light about the warning signs and signals the shooter gave to others, who then took no action to intervene."

Since the fatal Sandy Hook shooting, 483 people have signed the Sandy Hook Promise, which states "I promise to do all I can to protect children from gun violence by encouraging and supporting solutions that create safer, healthier homes, schools and communities."

"While we at Sandy Hook Promise believe our country needs to make progress on policies for appropriate firearm access, we also believe that we must change our attitudes and behaviors on passively accepting daily threats and violence, believing ourselves immune to having this sort of tragedy in our own community and believing we are helpless to prevent it in any case. None of us are immune and none of us are helpless," Barden and Hockley said.