The day Fred Guttenberg’s daughter Jaime died in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting wasn’t the first American tragedy that took one of his loved ones. Years earlier, his brother died from cancer, likely caused by his work at the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack. But the tragedy that took his daughter’s life is the one that changed his “perfectly stable, normal life” forever.

“Never in a million years could I have thought my family would be part of another American tragedy, but we were—Feb. 4, 2018. I sent my two children to school. It is all that I did,” he tells podcast host Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal.

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Guttenberg, author of Find the Helpers: What 9/11 and Parkland Taught Me About Recovery, Purpose, and Hope, walked Molly through the events of that day, including the phone call from his son, Jessie, who also attended Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School where the shooting occurred.

“My son Jessie was on the phone with me, telling me every detail of what was happening. As he was on the phone with me, he and I listened together as we heard the gunshots on the third floor that were killing my daughter, killing his sister. And my perfectly normal average every day, American life, became broken and it became shattered,” he says.

Even after this horrendous loss, and all the losses from gun violence that people have experienced in the four-plus years since, Guttenberg says he’s hopeful for better gun policy.

“No matter where I go, people agree with what I’m trying to do. They support it. And as long as I keep getting that sense, I will have hope that we can fix this,” he says. “Every act of gun violence that happened right now is preventable. It’s also predictable. And the next one, that will happen sometime within the hour that we’re on this interview, is also predictable because we haven’t done anything to change that dynamic.”

It’s in the hands of the American people, he says: “If people show up and vote, I have a sincere hope that they will, we will be okay, but they need to get out and vote.”

Guttenberg also tells Molly that he tries to answer every question people have for him because he doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to anyone else. But there are two things he won’t do: The first is run for office, and the second is refer to his daughter in the past tense.

“I don’t have a future of new experiences with her, but I have a future of experiences that are going to happen because of what happened to her,” he says.

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