The congressman who represents the neighborhoods surrounding Columbine High School said the 25th anniversary of the shooting that left 13 victims dead at the Jefferson County school should spur lawmakers to do what they can to reduce gun violence.

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat, told Colorado Politics that the anniversary is a time to honor the victims and renew efforts to enact what he called “very common sense” policy to reduce the dangers posed by firearms, which in 2020 overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death of children and teenagers in the United States.

“Prior to Columbine, shootings didn’t really happen in America like this, and since 1999, the pace and the frequency of these have just spun out of control,” said Crow. “And now it’s a part of our everyday life, and this doesn’t have to be normal.”

The Columbine shooting — at the time, the worst school shooting the country had seen — has cast a shadow across the decades, Crow said, changing the way Americans think about schools and their children’s safety.

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“So many of us who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, we didn’t have to grow up doing shooter drills or taking bulletproof backpacks to school or jumping out of our seats when a balloon pops at a pep rally,” said Crow, who represents the suburban 6th Congressional District. “We have now created this societal trauma that all of our children are living with. It’s impacting their mental health, their ability to learn, their overall well being.”

Crow and fellow Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday joined the father of a Columbine victim and other advocates outside the Capitol in Washington, where they called for congressional action.

Tom Mauser, the father of Daniel Mauser, read his son’s name and the names of the 11 other students and one teacher who were killed in the April 20, 1999, shooting.

“We cannot wait another 25 years to get a significant gun safety legislature,” Mauser said. “The story is not over — not just for Columbine and the Columbine community, but in the case of all gun violence. It’s important for people to know that for the people who’ve lived through gun violence, the story is never over.”

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, the Denver Democrat whose congressional district included Columbine until new boundaries took effect last year, noted that gunfire in schools has soared since the Columbine shooting.

“Students shouldn’t be scared to go to class. Gun violence prevention is not a partisan issue. It affects every family in this country — and it’s past time now for us to act at a national level,” she said.

Others on hand at the press conference included Colorado’s two U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, and U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, a California Democrat and the chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

Crow told Colorado Politics that a bipartisan gun bill passed by Congress in 2022 — the first national legislation on guns signed into law this century — marked a step in the right direction but wasn’t enough. He also lauded the Biden administration for a federal rule announced last week to require background checks on firearms sales at gun shows, closing what advocates have called a loophole that allowed the Columbine shooters to obtain some of their guns.

“There has been some progress, and even at the state and local level, we’re seeing that too, including in Colorado as we take up the assault weapons ban,” Crow said, referring to a bill making its way through the state legislature to ban “assault weapons.”

Crow, a co-sponsor of a federal “assault weapons” ban, said he supports the Colorado legislation, whose fate remains uncertain after passing the state House and heading to the state Senate.

“We know it works because we had it on the books for a decade,” Crow said. “We had a national assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004, and during that period, shootings using those weapons went down by over a third.”

He acknowledged that the proposed ban won’t bring an end to shootings.

“Public policies aren’t designed to prevent every problem and to fully solve an issue. There’s no policy in history that solved all of the problems. It’s to reduce greatly the amount of problems and the impact on the community of certain issues,” he said, comparing measures seeking gun restrictions to traffic safety laws, which led to steep reductions in motorists’ deaths after seatbelts were required.

Crow, who introduced a resolution last week to commemorate the Columbine anniversary, said he plans to continue pushing a bill he first introduced in 2019 to close what he terms “the Colorado loophole,” which would prohibit federally licensed firearms dealers from transferring rifles or shotguns to purchasers whose residence is in another state.

The bill was inspired by a 2019 incident when Front Range schools and residents went on alert after an 18-year-old woman who was reportedly obsessed with the Columbine shooting flew to Colorado from Florida and immediately purchased a shotgun. Crow’s legislation would require gun dealers to treat long guns the same as handguns.

It’s unlikely to pass out of the Republican-controlled House this session, he conceded.

“This particular Congress is a special level of dysfunction, right? Now, that’s not my opinion, that’s just the fact,” Crow said, adding that he doubts many other “big things” will get done before a new House is elected in November. “But that doesn’t mean that we stopped trying.”