After Sandy Hook, I started working with the sisters, teachers, and mothers whose lives were transformed forever by that shooting. I spent a lot of time with them and got to know a few of them well. They were poised and focused. The first visit was filled with the optimism that comes from “doing something.” With each visit though, it seemed (and maybe I’m wrong) that the optimism waned internally for some of them. Remember, these are people whose six year old children were massacred by a heavily armed man in the middle of the day for no particular reason. One visit to the Capitol should have been enough. Two should have been enough. Three…

When it came time for Manchin-Toomey, somehow the closest thing we’ve gotten to bipartisan gun legislation, the Sandy Hook families returned. I sat with them in the Leader’s gallery, above the Senate floor. I knew the result beforehand. Moments like John McCain’s face turn are rare in the Senate. I’d guess that on 90% of votes, any senior and a lot of junior staffers, can tell you how every member will vote.

The Sandy Hook families, though, did not know the result beforehand. They returned with that optimism from that first trip. Then they had that optimism ripped from them not unlike how their loved ones were ripped from them.

One mother of a Sandy Hook teacher stood up and yelled “shame.” She was removed from the gallery by US Capitol Police and taken briefly into custody but never charged with anything if I remember correctly. There was and remains a sick irony in that moment.

As she was being apprehended, I broke the fourth wall and just apologized a lot to her and the other family members for the place that I chose to work. Manchin-Toomey was the sort of legislation that any rational person looked at and said “well at least it’s something.” But for Senate Republicans, something was too much. Something remains too much today in the wake of yet two more of these regular acts of violence.

Whenever one of these massacres occurs, I think of the Sandy Hook families. Once I left Reid’s office in 2013, I lost track of them. I wonder where their minds go to when they see that 20 people were slaughtered to death in a Walmart on a Saturday. Sandy Hook wasn’t the first case of an angry white man with access to an AR-15 killing a lot of people for some or no reason. But it was supposed to be the straw that broke the turtle’s back.

Instead, we are here. Every single moment that Mitch McConnell, John Cronyn, John Thune, and Roy Blunt dare leave their homes, they should be confronted with the faces of the people they had a chance to protect, but chose campaign donations over.

I made a tweet yesterday about the staff members who work for those and other Republican senators. They are people that many of you consider friends and trust me, it’s okay to have friends who believe in lower taxes. It is not okay, though, to have friends who believe that it’s okay that a dozen or so five year olds should die at school or that families out shopping on a Saturday should have their heads shot through.

Talk to these friends. Ask them if they understand what they’re doing working for people as callous as McConnell, Cornyn, and the rest. There are many, many jobs in Washington for people who happen to believe in conservatism and not all of them involve turning a blind eye away from the rush of human blood.