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Mother Of Connecticut Teen Killed With Unsecured Gun To Testify On Federal Gun Control Bill

Mark Pazniokas
/
CT Mirror
Kristin Song is briefly overcome during a vote that passed gun control legislation in the Connecticut House in 2019. Her husband, Michael, looking up, said he felt his son's presence and absence during the debate.

The mother of a Connecticut teenager killed in a 2018 gun accident will testify before congress on Tuesday. She will speak in favor of a bill named in her son’s memory.

Kristin Song’s 15-year-old son Ethan accidentally shot himself in the head with a handgun owned by a friend’s father. Michael Song is her husband and Ethan’s father.

“Just got his braces off. And he walked into a home 10 minutes from here where loaded and unsecured guns were the norm. The attitude in that house was guns are cool, guns are fun — what’s the need to secure a single one? And every responsible gun owner I know thinks that’s insane. That’s the word they use. Insane,” Michael Song said.

Kristin Song will testify before a subcommittee headed by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He is sponsoring a bill that would require loaded and unloaded guns to be locked away in homes where there are minors. It’s called Ethan’s Law.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed a statewide version of Ethan’s Law in 2019, but no major gun control legislation has passed on a federal level since before the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 20 children and six educators.

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He fell in love with sound-rich radio storytelling while working as an assistant reporter at KBIA public radio in Columbia, Missouri. Before coming back to radio, he worked in digital journalism as the editor of Newtown Patch. As a freelance reporter, his work for WSHU aired nationally on NPR. Davis is a proud graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism; he started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.

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