Steve Hartman on his new Netflix documentary

What you want is something that you can't have.

Hey, girlfriend. It's a lovely day. Her room, that was her safe place.

When that time comes that that room is not there, does she go away? I'm going to try and get through this without getting emotional. Steve Hartman joins me now. Steve, I know you are a father. I am a mom of young kids, and you spent seven years traveling the country visiting these untouched rooms. What inspired you to do this? Well, I felt like the country was growing numb to this crisis. I felt like I was growing numb to this crisis. I felt like every time we covered a school shooting, we'd just move on and didn't seem to care as much as we once did. So I started wondering, what could I do to maybe shake myself and the rest of the country out of this numbness and make us feel the weight of this again? Because I feel like we need to feel the weight of the problem before we can solve the problem, and that's where the idea came from.

Don't want to wait until the next one. What touched you the most after visiting these rooms? Any examples you can give that are seared in your brain? I know we've been seeing that image over and over again of the hair ties on the doorknob. Yeah that's one. It was a lot of little things like that that just show how quickly these lives were extinguished because in some rooms, it's as if the kids-- it's like the day that it happened, and sometimes it's five years later. There's one image of a toothpaste tube, and the cap is off. And I just look at that picture, and I think that kid was expecting to come back and do that undone task, and just so many things like that. I think you look into these rooms, and you can imagine your own child because sometimes the things are the same. They've got the same, like the little safe there, things like that, the same things my kids have. So it drives it home.

You mentioned the kids expecting to complete the undone task. The parents expecting that the kids will come home and complete the undone task. What was it like meeting with these families? The parents, actually, we laughed and we cried. It was because they love talking about their kid. They don't want anybody to forget their child. So it was actually a joy to spend time with the parents. But there's definitely sadness there because the rooms are both a source of agony and a source of comfort. They want to keep them. They can't let them go. It's almost like another stage of grief. Packing up the room would be another stage of grief that many parents just aren't yet willing to take on. What do you want people to take away from this? The film has no agenda. Guns are never mentioned, for example. We're not really focused on any solutions. I just hope that the film serves-- if enough people watch it, that the film can serve as a reset because we all want to solve this problem, and I'm hoping that we can unite around this film that really isn't trying to beat you over the head about any one particular issue. It just shows that we need to fix it, and let's start here.

Steve Hartman, thank you so much. You can watch All the Empty Roomsnow on Netflix.