Six years ago this Friday saw the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not at an elementary school. Not to 20 six-year-olds and six of their teachers. Not just before Christmas. But it did.

Having lived my entire life in Newtown, I could not have predicted that on this anniversary I would be in Belfast studying Conflict Transformation and Social Justice because of what happened that day. Nor would I have then seen a reason to look outside of the US to better understand the trauma and harm endured by my country in what seems to be an endless cycle of tragedy.

Now, I know better. The casualties of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” were killed and injured in a different way than America’s gun violence epidemic. But the mechanisms to address these acts of violence – and the slowness of the response in doing so – occur because of similar state dynamics. Political leaders in both these places would frequently offer “thoughts and prayers” to satiate communal grievances for “yet another” attack; signifying their outrage with the morality of the act, and highlighting their unwillingness to address it. Most citizens in turn, inundated with such consistent violence, have learned to compartmentalise the horrors that represent their worst nightmare.

On both sides of the civic equation, each successive incident becomes an accepted “fact of life”.

At a certain point, however, the violence becomes too much for those thinking, praying and compartmentalising. The political leadership changes and the civic society becomes invested in protecting the community, no longer just in their own neighbourhoods for damage control, but across the nation for comprehensive change. The people reach levels of unrestrained anger and grief that can only be channelled into activism for themselves and their families. Suddenly, everyone is affected – it is no longer just “those poor people on the news.”

In Northern Ireland, a weariness of the massacres affecting all communities helped bring about the political peace of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In the US, the catalyst for more comprehensive change can be traced to two tipping points: the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the activism this year of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Why did it take six years and hundreds of thousands more casualties across the States to begin to act after Sandy Hook? We in the US can learn from Northern Ireland here. There needed to be institutions in place to address the violence and a mobilised population of agitated survivors willing to do the work. There needed to be widespread trauma. There needed to be a political moment. Most importantly, the culture needed to change to accept action.

In the US, the election of Trump helped to activate an elaborate network of progressives united to oppose a president they saw as unrepresentative of the people he was elected to lead.

Gun rights organisations, and the firearms industry, have confused political leadership, scaring lawmakers through campaign contributions, lobbying efforts and gun rights-favourability rankings to shape Washington, D.C. policy since the 1930s. Gun violence prevention advocacy has had a shorter lifespan, however, starting with mobilisation in the 1960s for the Gun Control Act, the 1990s for the Brady Bill – named for James Brady, the press secretary injured in the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan – 2007 for Virginia Tech and 2012 for Sandy Hook. But until recently these efforts remained disjointed.

When Trump was elected, these pockets of gun violence prevention advocacy groups became enveloped into a larger progressive network, where gun violence became a central initiative. These widespread national networks, however, were not there six years ago to coordinate the many grassroots efforts predating Sandy Hook.

When Parkland happened, just two months after the five-year anniversary of Newtown, these new relationships were put to the test. The students of Parkland had been conditioned by a culture of school shootings, where lock-down drills were not just a drill. With many of the Parkland survivors coming of voting age following the attack, the political moment of “anti-Trump” was combined with an intersectional approach, mobilising all voters to take the issue of gun violence to the polls. They collaborated with other efforts as well, using those networks that had been growing since Newtown and Trump’s election to move to eliminating gun violence as a third rail issue.

The US, a country built by firepower and firearms, is – slowly – beginning to incorporate gun violence prevention into its identity, and we can once again learn from Northern Ireland about the legacy of conflict. The divisiveness between “gun rights” and “gun violence prevention” advocates stems from unwillingness on both sides to listen to one another, inevitably creating mutually-exclusive categories that work against minimising gun deaths and injuries.

These divisions will not disappear overnight, as is evident with the tensions that still remain between and among communities here in Northern Ireland; deriving often from sentiments of isolation from the state and a lack of recognition for experienced trauma.

These divisions can only be addressed with increased access to information about the issue of gun violence; or in Northern Ireland, the violence of the Troubles. Debates in the US over the effectiveness of firearm laws, and the costs and causes of gun violence are lacking because there is not a body of literature to inform the general public, lawmakers and advocates. Conversations instead become ruled by emotion, on both sides of the aisle. Emotions are expected in a debate concerning the deaths of loved ones and the perceived removal of rights. But, these conversations ruled by emotion become reduced to debates deemed partisan, irrational and unworthy.

To address this sentiment requires starting with credible information – not “alternative facts” – delivered by unbiased research agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and universities.

Six years later, we have begun to take steps towards more substantive and collective action to prevent gun violence. Prevention is beginning to shift from power located among legislators afraid to touch the Second Amendment, to a country demanding action on behalf of the many who cannot.

It has often been said, usually in resignation, that if Sandy Hook could not change people’s minds, nothing would. Barack Obama called his inability to pass common-sense gun laws in the aftermath of the shooting and the months that followed the “greatest frustration of my presidency.”

But now, perhaps, the legacy of Sandy Hook, and Parkland; as well as Las Vegas, Charleston and the many more not covered by the press, is having an unstoppable cumulative effect. Now, is a time for all survivors, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, to be recognised as a population where Not One More is more than a hashtag.