This article is the latter part of a two-part series I’m writing about the Parkland shooting. Last article I discussed the emotional and personal side of what happened and in this article, I would like to expand on a topic that I only briefly mentioned before. That topic is: what happens now and how to make meaning come from this tragedy.

Recently the news cycle has been dominated by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school and other schools around the country standing up for what they believe in and demanding that gun control regulation is passed.For too long kids have stayed silent on political issues that affect them, maybe hoping the adults would enact the change that is needed if given time, but finally have said enough is enough and are taking matter into there "own hands" so to speak. I have to say that I agree with them. Something has to change. As Albert Einstein says, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” We can’t expect anything to change if no action is taken.

The key to any change is action. For far too long politicians have talked and talked and talked about what is going to change and what needs to be done different, but so far have not taken any action. Talk is cheap and in this case, it is very true that actions speak louder than words. Politicians' words say that something is going to change but their actions, or lack thereof, say something completely different. I think this is something that many other people are taking note of as well. We have heard that change is coming but you can only “cry wolf” or in this case promise something and not do it, so many times, before people lose trust and demand that those words are followed by actions. After every shooting politicians pay lip service to the families, sending us disingenuous platitudes in order to both satiate their own conscience and look good for them politically. They tell us what we want to hear, in order to distract us from the fact that their actions say differently. It’s classic misdirection.

Misdirection takes many other forms, especially in the gun debate. The main issue here is gun control, but every time people always try to make it something else. An asinine topic of misdirection that has come out of this iteration of the gun debate is the idea of giving guns to teachers. The risk factors associated with this are astronomical, from teachers shooting kids out of rage, a kid using the gun to shoot someone or the gun accidentally going off; there are way too many risk factors involved to even consider this idea, let alone the fiscal impossibility of the whole thing. The only reason this topic has gained any traction is that it is touted by the NRA and their supporters. Arming teachers would give them exactly what they want, which is more guns and further engraining gun culture into society.

Another topic of misdirection is talk about the FBI “dropping the ball” on a tip that was given to them in January, saying that Nick Cruz said he was going to “shoot up a school”, a phrase that is now seen as a foreshadowing more than a warning. Many people have said that if the FBI had followed up on the tip, then he wouldn’t have been able to commit the murders he did and that’s true, but it takes away from the bigger point, which is, if Nick Cruz couldn’t have gotten a gun, then he wouldn’t have been able to massacre all the people he did. You can say you are going to do something all you want but if you don’t have the means, you can’t do it. Overhauling the FBI is not the answer because it would most likely cost millions, if not billions, of dollars and by its very nature, being a large bureaucracy, things will slip through the cracks.

Another ideology of misdirection is that we need to secure schools. Securing schools is taking a roundabout approach to solving a problem when it could be solved simply by establishing stricter gun control. Securing schools is security theater just like the School Resource Officer who was on campus, it makes us feel safe but doesn’t do anything to protect us. Turning schools into a prison is not the answer and we wouldn’t need to "protect" schools with metal detectors, extra fencing ect. if we had stricter gun control regulations.

I hope that the events of this past Valentines Day can finally put to rest the idea that "a good guy with a gun is the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun" because there was a good guy with a gun present, on campus and he DIDN’T. DO. SHIT. He stood outside and did nothing while the shooting went on inside. While he got there too late to have saved Carmen, everyone who died on the third floor of the building that day might not have if he had gone inside. Officer Peterson, a guy who had no problem breaking up rap battles during lunch for being “disruptive” or power playing scared kids who got sent to the office for minor infractions but when the time came for him to perform the job he was hired to do, he did nothing. If a guy who was trained with a gun and had also been a cop for decades didn’t take down or even engage the shooter, what makes lawmakers think that an untrained teacher will?

The issue that all these other minor, “misdirection” issues keep pointing back too, or avoid trying to talk about, is gun control. For some reason, in America, people would rather own guns then ensure that children can grow up without the fear of being shot in school or spare families the pain of losing a child. For this, I hold the NRA and Wayne Lapierre directly responsible. They created the current culture of gun infatuation, which has led to no significant gun control legislation being passed thus far, even though there have been countless mass shootings and that lack of regulation DIRECTLY led to Nicholas Cruz being able to buy the semi-automatic "assault style" rifle that was used to kill my sister.

Too often the focus of efforts against the NRA lies in attacking them for campaign donations to candidates. While money in politics is one of the biggest threats to democracy currently, the money the NRA gives to most elected officials is just a drop in the bucket of their overall campaign funds, meaning the NRA’s money is of no consequence to them. People often harp on the donations because it is a clear representation of how the NRA is attempting to influence policy by what some portray as “buying their support." In reality, the real power of the NRA doesn’t lie in it’s spending power, but the members that make up the organization. The NRA has created what Bill Sher from the Tampa Bay Times calls “a movement that has convinced its followers that gun ownership is a way of life, central to one’s freedom and safety, that must be defended on a daily basis.” The NRA has turned a large majority of voters, mostly Republicans, into single-issue voters who vote on candidates solely based upon their stance on gun control and whether or not that politician will protect their right to own a gun, a symbol of their freedom. This is a large issue because a Republican politician will more than likely not make it past the primaries unless they support the gun rights of these NRA members. The NRA exerts its power through the votes of its followers, to which they constantly feed propaganda which keeps them on edge that politicians are coming for their guns and they must protect those guns at all costs, because how else will they defend their freedom?

Gun control advocates are trying to fight this issue with the idea that if you present people with facts about how guns are bad, they will change their opinion. However, gun control is not a rational issue, it follows the new political trend of dealing with emotion, rather than logical fact; as gun policy expert Dr. Robert Spitzer said to Time magazine, “It’s about beliefs and how people view the world.” That is why if we want to make any reasonable headway in gun control, we need to combat gun culture. As Bill Sher proposes in his article “Why the NRA always wins” we should look at the anti-tobacco “truth” campaign as a guide on how to create a successful public service campaign that could turn the tide of public opinion. The cigarette campaign, geared towards changing teen perspectives from seeing cigarettes as “cool”, showed cigarettes as a health hazard and a product of corporate corruption, showing teenagers how “big tobacco” manipulated them into wanting the product, which worked because the last thing teenagers will do is anything they think they are being forced into. Many also credit the campaign for helping drive down teen smoking rates since the commercials started airing.

In a similar campaign for gun control, the goal would be to change gun advocates views from “guns are a source of freedom and cool, with the extra bonus of protecting me from grievous harm” to one of support for gun regulation by showing them, as Bill Sher says “the damage guns do every day: the depressed never getting another chance for mental health services, the children dying from home accidents, the domestic abuse victims who never could escape.” Hopefully, by presenting them with the “ugly truth” and showing them that their views are not supported by a large number of personal stories and testimonials, it will get them to understand that guns have a large negative impact on society. Using emotion is the only way to fight emotion, and emotion resonates a lot more with people nowadays then fact. What we have to change is people’s beliefs, and by the very definition of beliefs, you can’t change that with fact. Things you “believe” in are things you think are true, without having any factual evidence to support it, so combating “beliefs” with fact will not do any good because “beliefs” aren’t grounded in fact at all. Having something equivalent to the people in the anti-smoking commercials, who got cancer from smoking or had to get a tracheotomy from smoking, but for guns is important so people will listen to the facts when they are presented, instead of automatically tuning them out.

Now I am not under the impression that all guns will be banned, in this day and age it is completely unrealistic, but banning semi-automatic guns, can and should happen. For those who want to shoot for legitimate reasons, such as hunting, I think they should be able to access a bolt action rifle, or pump shotgun. No one needs a gun that can shoot a 30-round clip in under a minute to go hunting, and if you do, you should probably shouldn’t be hunting. You can’t eat an animal after you shoot it 30 times anyway, the meat is unusable. Most semi-automatic guns aren’t even made for hunting to begin with, they were designed to kill people in war, as fast and as many as possible. They have no place in civilian society.

Often people refute banning such weapons because “If someone wants a gun, they will get one”. That may very well be true, but illegal guns are exorbitantly expensive and hard to find and it's about putting obstacles in the way of someone wanting to buy an assault rifle, because everyone has a threshold of how much difficulty they are willing to face before they give up and the idea is to create enough barriers to go around and hoops to jump through, so that a majority of people who would think about doing something harmful with a gun give up before getting one.

There is also this persisting belief that banning semi-automatic weapons won’t do anything because “you can do the same thing with a pistol or shotgun.” Pistol maybe, but pistols cannot shoot through walls and still have enough velocity to kill people, like what happened at MSD and the bullets do a lot less traumatic damage to body tissue then semi-auto rounds do. With a shotgun, you might be able to shoot through a wall, but your aim is going to be thrown off from all the recoil and the fire rate is not as high. Throwing in hunting riles as well, it's really hard to kill a lot of people fast when you have to reload after every time you shoot. Just like with the “they will just find another way to get a gun argument” the whole idea is to put enough obstacles in the way where mass shootings won’t happen, and if a shooting does occur, make it really hard to kill many people at once.

Obviously, my personal experience with gun violence taints my viewpoint but personal experience is the only way in which your viewpoints are put to the test and you can really understand both sides of an argument. For instance, take a look at Dick Chaney, who took hard opinions against same-sex marriage until his own daughter came out as a lesbian. After the fact he changed his viewpoints on the matter, later telling Barbara Walters in 2011 that “I certainly don’t have a problem with” same-sex marriage. Having a personal experience involving a policy issue really makes you think about your views and forces you to re-think your views and adapt them to what happened. What happened to Carmen was prevenable and as a nation we should take steps to ensure that what happened to my family does not happen again.