“Not again,” was the first thought I had when I first saw news of the Parkland shooting.

I didn’t quite grasp the idea of 17 dead until I saw their names and faces and read their stories. I didn’t expect them to be so similar to people I knew in high school. I didn’t expect to read about the heroic teachers who died and imagine my high school mentors facing the same fate.

In the wake of the horrific school shooting in Florida, I have come across many different posts on social media. Some share the heartbreaking stories of the victims, the survivors and the heroes. Others try to delve into the life of the gunman—his troubled, delinquent past and his obsession with weapons and destruction.

I understand these posts. As humans, we are all trying to understand what happened, how it happened and the horrors the survivors lived through. We want to understand how a disturbed 19-year-old was able to legally purchase an assault rifle. We want to understand how this is the world we are living in in 2018.

There are, however, some social media posts I cannot understand in the wake of this tragedy. Posts that defend the laws that allowed this man to buy a lethal weapon that killed 17 people and injured even more than that. Posts that blatantly ignore the irresponsibility of the United States gun laws that allowed a tragedy like this to happen.

The AR-15 is the weapon that was used in Parkland. It is also the weapon that was used in Newtown, Las Vegas, Orlando and Texas.

The AR-15 is a semi-automatic assault weapon modeled after the United States military M16 rifle — an automatic weapon used in Vietnam. The AR-15 is a weapon designed to kill. It is not designed just for protection. It is designed for speedy reloading in combat situations.

In the wake of the horrific school shooting in Florida, there are Americans who refuse to recognize that our gun laws are a problem. There are Americans who do not see a problem with civilians owning assault weapons. This letter is to them.

In a survey done by Pew research center, 67 percent of gun owners said they owned a gun for protection, and this is an understandable and valid reason to own a firearm. The United States is a unique country because its population is so widely spread out, and there are many citizens who live in rural areas where the police are not nearby.

There are valid reasons for wanting a gun—reasons that make gun ownership in the United States a more complicated issue than in other, smaller countries. But it is an incontestable truth that gun violence in the United States is an issue. According to a study by The American Journal of Medicine, compared to 22 other high-income countries, the United States’ gun related murder rate is 25 times higher. Americans are seven times more likely to die from violence and six times more likely to be accidentally killed with a gun.

The fact of the matter is that not every gun owner in the United States is a responsible gun owner, and this is why we need more stringent gun laws. This is why the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have rallied for stricter gun laws.

The fact is that gun violence in a problem in the United States, but the sad truth is there is not enough research to even know where to begin solving that problem. In 1996, the National Rifle Association accused the CDC of promoting gun control, and Congress threatened to strip funding until it stopped gun control research.

The fact is that 17 innocent people are dead because a disturbed young man was allowed to legally buy a gun he should not have been able to, and they are not the only people who have been casualties of irresponsible gun laws.

It is time that the United States government and the NRA start to recognize that their negligence is killing people, and it is time for them to finally take responsibility.