I agree with what Steve Kerr, the former player of the Chicago Bulls, and the current great coach of the Golden State Warriors says about coaching.

Kerr is a great human being. I first met him at the Binghamton Holiday Inn in 1997 and I remember him telling me, “I love coaching basketball and helping them become the best versions of themselves is incredibly gratifying. It is also a job that offers insight into how fragile life can be – an injury, bad break or a change to their circumstances can shift everything for the worse.”

I concur with his philosophy and coached high school and college basketball for over 25 years. Life is the same way. I found that out in 1972 when I lost my first wife, Irish, to a doctor’s mistake and then my second wife, Karen in 2024, due to cancer. I was married for a total of 58 years to two of the most beautiful people you ever want to meet.

Coach Kerr lost his father, Malcom Kerr, to gun violence in 1984 at 52 years old. My losses and my families’ losses were also profound. Even though the circumstances were different, the anxiety, depression and fear are the same.

As the title of this article implies, “All the Empty Rooms,” is about gun violence across America, which is the No. 1 killer of children in America. During the Academy Awards this past spring, which I was watching, in terms of an Academy Award for an international award on social issues went to “All the Empty Rooms,” a documentary on gun violence against children in America.

Karen and I had nine grandchildren and since the Columbine school shooting, the idea of fear for them has troubled me for the past years. How do we move the needle on how our society views this issue? Gun violence isn’t abstract. It is human loss.

Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook, are tragedies beyond one’s comprehension. However, what’s just as dangerous as gun violence, is that society is becoming numb to it. Reading about it again and again, watching kids leaving buildings with hands on their heads over and over again, then shaking our heads and going back to our lives unchanged.

We can’t keep saying “this is horrible” and then move on like we have done enough. Mr. Kerr stated in his article when he first heard about “All the Empty Rooms,” he knew it was a project he believed in, as I do also.

He joined in as an Executive Director because he could see and feel Director Joshua Seftel approaching this crisis with the care and the respect it deserves. In essence, the film listens to the surviving families of the children killed. It gives them room to speak about their losses without exploiting their stories into politics or spectacles. There is dignity in that choice, which is difficult to find in our country.

Gun violence is usually talked about. “All the Empty Rooms” follows journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they travel across the country, stepping into the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings.

Last year there were 394 school shootings and most of them were one on one shootings, not massive like Sandy Hook. When they go into these bedrooms, they just let you sit with what’s left behind: the bed, the posters, trophies, trinkets — the little things that tell you who this child was before everything stopped. I would urge every parent when they are alone, spending some time alone in your children’s room. You may think, “this could be our family, our kids.”

That’s the power of this film when I watched it — taking something that we’ve learned to keep at arm’s length and bringing it right back where it belongs.

“All the Empty Rooms” reaches people in a way arguments can’t. People recognize the humanity in these parents and the weight of their grief, and the chill of the voids left in their lives.

Out of respect and humility, Bopp, Kerr and the director take their shoes off before entering the bedrooms.

Finally, the parents here are not asking to be symbols. They are talking about their children, about love, about absence, about time standing still. If we really allow ourselves to feel what these families are living with, we might finally be ready to do something about it.

One of the counties I cover in sales had a woman tell me after a brief conversation about gun violence, “This could never happen here because we don’t have those kinds of people here.” I didn’t respond, but simply smiled and said to myself, “What cave does this lady and her community live in!”

Mike Tramuta is a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy counselor. He can be reached at 716-983-1592