My nephew is now sixteen years old, driving a car and thinking about college. But ten years ago, when he was in first grade at Sandy Hook Elementary, one person with a semi-automatic rifle ended the possibility of a bright future for twenty of his classmates and six of the adults trying to keep them safe. Those six- and seven-year-olds should be sixteen and seventeen today. Instead of driving and thinking about the future, they are forever frozen in the past, having never made it past the days of playing with toy cars.

In this piece, the twenty broken toy cars represent the twenty children killed that day and the six red lines represent the adults who died trying to protect them. There are 1,000 stitches that make up those six red lines - one for each of the 1,000 shootings on school grounds in the ten years since this horrific tragedy (according to Everytown for Gun Safety).