Earlier Thursday morning, CBS This Morning's reporter Norah O'Donnell spoke with parents who lost their six-year-old daughter during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Robbie and Alissa Parker talked about dealing with the lost of their daughter Emily and revealed that they had a meeting with killer Adam Lanza's father. Alissa said that she initiated the meeting in order to receive closure to the horrific school shooting where 20 first-graders and six educators were murdered.
The meeting "was kind of my doing," Alissa Parker explained. "I guess the reason why I felt strongly that I needed to tell [Peter Lanza] something. And I needed to get that out of my system. I felt very motivated to do it and ... I felt really good about it, I prayed about it, and it was something that I needed to do." [You can watch the interview below.]
The airing of the video came on the morning that Vice President Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg met with the families from Newtown, Connecticut to talk about the need for federal gun reform. This meeting comes in wake of the Senate Democrats' decision to exclude a ban on military-style assault weapons from their gun-control legislation that will be presented on the Senate Floor in April.
Last December, Adam Lanza used an assault weapon during Sandy Hook School shooting before killing himself. However, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he was compelled to drop the ban on the sale of assault-style weapons because it will not get enough votes to pass in the Senate. Reid told reporters on Tuesday that his colleague Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein's assault ban proposal would hinder their Party's goal to pass gun reform. "Right now, her amendment, using the most optimistic numbers, has less than 40 votes. That's not 60," Reid said. "I have to get something on the floor so we can have votes on that issue and the other issues."
Today, at City Hall, the Vice President and Bloomberg plan to continue to "press the case for a common sense federal gun law," the mayor's office said. Biden and Bloomberg have been working together to develop a cohesive set of gun control proposals to deliver to President Barack Obama for months. The legislative package Biden developed does include the assault weapons ban along with universal federal background checks and limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
Watch the video interview here.