The gun control debate in America is over.

It almost doesn’t need repeating. Last week, America saw its largest mass shooting since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. On Dec. 2, 14 lives were lost and 21 were injured in a massacre in San Bernardino. And although it was the largest mass shooting of 2015, it was by no means the only one. It was the 355^th mass shooting this year, which, at that point, only had 335 days.

And as a nation, we swiftly responded as we normally do; by doing nothing.

You can see the gray in our president’s hair growing as he makes a nearly weekly address about this issue. The youthful, booming power that made his voice one of the most recognizable in 2008 has dwindled to a solemn plea, barely able to hold in its frustration and sadness that we have done nothing and enacted no measures to prevent the innumerable mass shootings.

And can you blame him? It is (and should be) common knowledge that the United States experiences more gun violence than any other developed nation in the world. And it’s not even a contest. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime reported that the United States has a homicide-by-firearm rate of 3.21 out of 100,000 people. The next on the list is Canada, which has a rate of 0.51 out of 100,000 people, and even their rate nearly quadruples that of Australia, the next country on the list. An article published by The Atlantic in January of this year cited a Center for Disease Control study that predicted, based on recent data, that guns may kill more Americans under 25 than cars by the end of this year. And, of all children aged 0 to 14 in developed countries that are killed by guns, 87 percent are American, according to a study done by The Journal of TRAUMA Injury, Infection, and Critical Care. And is it coincidental that we have 88.8 firearms in America per 100 people, more than 14 times more than the United Kingdom? While it’s fair to bring up “correlation does not imply causation,” it should be pretty obvious that it's possible that that might in this case.

While it’s true that gun violence has actually decreased since a peak in the 1990s, mass killings by guns are certainly not rare. Active shooting incidents have gone up in recent years, and a Congressional Research Service report found that in a period of roughly thirty years, we have seen 78 large-scale mass murders carried out with guns, killing 547 people. They’ve become an essentially routine part of our culture, and while there are a plethora of statistics to prove this, I’m not sure anyone at this point is debating that.

A popular pro-gun argument is that “the only thing that can stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun.” Many use it to support the idea that we should remove, lessen, or keep the current regulations to make the United States a battlefield between good and evil. The logic holds up if you assume that, in the United States, citizens are unambiguously moral and well-trained 007s who will barrel roll to the front of their elementary school classroom or movie theater and shoot the killer in the midst of the panic without killing innocent civilians or escalating the gun violence, riding off in the sunset on horseback with an American flag fluttering in the background.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Mother Jones tracked a large sample of American mass shootings from the past 30 years (the article was published in 2012) and in their study, they found zero that were stopped by a civilian with a gun. A few smaller scale incidents of gun violence in this study where armed civilians did intervene failed to stop the shooter and ended in the civilian being gravely wounded or killed. And while The Washington Post ran an article detailing true (and certainly remarkable) stories of citizens who have stopped shootings, they reflect a very small number in the larger epidemic, and (say it with me, people) gun control does not mean to take guns away from those law-abiding citizens. It wants to keep them out of the hands of the people who wanted to kill in the first place. So the idea that we need to increase the number of guns by removing restrictions so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to play Han Solo whenever disaster strikes can start throwing bullets around the room isn't the solution. Because (as it should be intuitive to believe) mass shootings would be incredibly difficult to stop. Many believe that gun violence only happens in gun-free zones (such as in the Umpqua Community College shooting, which wasn't a gun-free zone), but it happens in a multitude of environments where guns are allowed and armed citizens often aren't able to stop it. The few citizens who have stopped mass shootings were exceptions, knew what they were doing, would have passed strict gun control checks with flying colors, and those shootings would have still been prevented.

Or how about “it’s not a gun issue, it’s a mental health issue”? We’ll jump straight to the fact that the politicians who argue this point have done nothing to introduce legislation to help reform the mental health system, which is very flawed. Also, besides being a diversion, it frames the argument incorrectly. A study done by Jonathon M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish shows that there is very little population-wide evidence to suggest that people with mental illness are more likely to commit violent crimes. And while people with serious mental issues are three to four times more likely to be violent, they represent a small number of the mentally ill population, and a study showed that when Connecticut implemented mental health background checks into their gun laws, violence decreased only by a small amount. And what's most important to note is that the mentally ill are much more likely to be a victim of violence than the cause of it. Framing the issue as a mental health issue while doing nothing to help the system is exploitative and presents the mentally ill as violent criminals when, in fact, the opposite is true.

And let’s talk about the idea that Obama is “coming for your guns.” First, he's been president for seven years, and still hasn't touched your gun. Also, the second amendment is part of the Constitution, and we have to uphold it. In fact, it’s a really important part of our Constitution. Stripping all guns from all citizens reeks of totalitarianism and could put We the People in a vulnerable position. And I respect the law-abiding citizen who owns a gun, because although at heart he/she is not a killer, they would do whatever it takes to protect their family if an intruder threatened their lives (see the above-mentioned Washington Post article). So I think it should be stated, again, that no one is coming for your guns. If you’re a law-abiding citizen, you’ll still have your right to bear arms. And that’s the problem with American rhetoric. I’ve heard people say “if Obama wants to fulfill his sick desire and take my guns to fulfill his communist dystopia, he will have to come into my house and take them from my cold, dead hands.” Which is a really insane statement, considering the only thing Obama has suggested is something called “common sense” gun legislation. We’ve become so divided and entrenched in ideology that “these tragedies can’t keep happening, we need to do something to try to prevent them” gets filtered as “I hate America, I hate you, I hate your rights, and I want to take your gun for the sole purpose of infuriating you.”

So if the gun control crowd is not “coming for your guns,” what do they want? It’s simple, and it’s embedded in the name. Gun control. Right now, you can be on the no-fly list but still legally acquire a gun. You can be a convicted felon and still acquire a gun. You can be a suspected terrorist and legally buy a gun. And you can buy semi-automatic assault weapons. Consider those last two words. Assault weapons. Something that would make sense in "Rambo" or, you know, war. Not, you know, Starbucks. The only design for a weapon like that is to kill. And I still for the life of me cannot see why ordinary citizens need them.

So all the gun control crowd wants is a first step. Just to declare, as a nation, that it’s probably not safe for a convicted felon to legally own a weapon that is designed to kill many people in a short amount of time.

And here is where another argument arises in opposition to gun control; criminals don’t follow laws, so there’s no point in enacting them. There are gun-free zones in America that experience gun violence (as discussed above, it's not because citizens don't have the opportunity to stop it themselves), so that proves the ineffectiveness of gun control, right? Well, not necessarily, because without strong national laws, it's pretty easy to just go somewhere with lighter gun laws and purchase them. If you look at a nation like Australia, with strong national gun laws, their gun violence is imperceivable in comparison to ours. But you say that criminals won't respect national laws and will get them anyway. The philosophy of it makes sense, I suppose, but it is also an condemnation of any law ever, and it’s ridiculous that people argue that no laws should be enacted to get killing machines out of suspected terrorists' hands when those same people are refusing to approve legislation to legalize marijuana, which has killed or even harmed like, no one, ever.

And let’s talk about those politicians as well. The ones who repeat the phrase “thoughts and prayers” ad nauseam. A recent article by The Guardian showed presidential candidates’ tweets in reaction to the San Bernardino shootings and compared them to their NRA ratings (NRA ratings are based on one’s voting record on gun rights, so if you vote in favor of the NRA, you get a good rating). Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum (yes, he is still running) received A+ ratings from the NRA and offered, you guessed it, thoughts and prayers. But while they may be the top of the class, strong performances by Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio show grades of A, A, A, A-, A-, and B+, respectively. Did they tweet “thoughts and prayers” too? Yeaaaaah. No. Also, a journalist named Igor Volsky went to Twitter to reveal how much politicians have been funded by the NRA and showed that Senator Mitch McConnell’s reelection bid was given $922,000 by the NRA, and that the NRA spent more than $30 million on independent expenditures during the 2014 election cycle.

So pro-gun politicians are out of the debate. You can’t be taken seriously when you are funded by a special interest that has a huge financial stake in certain laws being written or not written. It’s not even that you as a person suck, it’s simply the nature of being funded by something. For example, if you work at McDonald’s, and someone comes up to you and asks, “Hey man, so are Big Macs total shit?” and your manager is right behind you, of course you’re going to say, “No! Big Macs aren’t total shit! They’re great.” Whether or not you believe Big Macs are total shit or not is irrelevant, because you are funded by McDonald’s and your hand is forced. So when a guy like Mitch McConnell argues against gun control, how can you believe him? Even if he was in favor of it (lol), he has no choice but to agree with the NRA. And I’m not naive enough to think that Democrats aren’t funded by special interests as well. But on this issue, it’s not even comparable, and a guy like Bernie Sanders, who makes a point of not being funded by anyone except for middle school teachers and stay-at-home dads, is calling for gun control.

I think a final but very important point to make is that no one thinks gun control is the solution. People argue that areas with gun control experience mass shootings. And that’s true. People argue that there will be a black market for guns, and that will be true. People argue that there’s no way for laws to prevent mass shootings from ever happening again. And that’s true. But for the love of God, we’re not pretending we have a cure, we’re calling for treatment. We want something to be done. Laws can’t fix the world, but if gun control could have saved the lives of just five people this year, could you have gone up to the families of those five people and said, “well, you know, gun laws wouldn’t have solved the whole problem, so it didn’t really matter” or “well, you know, that’s the price of freedom”? All we’re calling for is a simple step in the right direction. Because right now, by doing nothing, we're saying as a nation that lives don't matter.

But like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the gun control debate is over. And I didn’t mean that only because the evidence favors gun control. It’s because everyone has decided their ideology and will stick to it no matter what. In 2012, an elementary school and a movie theater were the sites of mass shootings. Earlier this year, it was a bible study. In each scenario, guns were purchased legally. Still, we have done nothing. In fact, many have suggested that the victims should have been armed. In an elementary school. In a movie theater. In a church. And that is the rhetoric that is reflected in our laws. Once we decided that it was okay for the NRA to have the influence it does, that bible studies and elementary schools could and should be considered war zones, the gun control argument ended. We decided that gun culture was too integral to our freedoms, and that dead churchgoers and children were the price to pay. If those tragedies weren’t enough to convince people that at least some measure should be at least attempted instead of just “thinking” about the victims, nothing ever will. Our gun culture used to make America the laughing stock of the world. But now, the world is weeping at our stubbornness.

But we have the power to vote. Democracy is by no means a perfect system, which is why we have a corporate-funded Congress who will fight tooth and nail to make sure legislative progress doesn’t happen in relation to these tragedies. But this can change. Vote for Congressmen who will enact gun control legislation. Vote for people whose interests in people’s lives aren’t influenced by a corporation looking to make profits off of tragedies (because that does keep happening, by the way). Engage in debates with your friends so that Minions memes aren't a way of developing beliefs. Sign petitions to let politicians know we won’t support this any longer. The greatest threat to the United States is ourselves, and we can and should use the opportunity we have, if small, to make a difference. Continue to think, and continue to pray. But prayers without works are just words.

We shouldn’t have to wait until it hits our hometown to move in the right direction.