It is not every day that you hear of a school shooting, or even a mass shooting, for that matter. But it is every two and half days that you hear of a school shooting, and every day and a half that you hear of a mass shooting.

Only 45 days into 2018, the United States has reported 30 mass shootings, 18 of them school shootings.

Less than two months into the new year, 25% of the country lives in a state where parents have sent their children to school and they did not return home. Because knowing that an explosion that can destroy the world is triggered by a one man’s finger is not worth implementing simple gun legislation, not even if it meant saving so many innocent lives.

We are supposed to teach ourselves how to stay safe in such a violent and cruel world, yet our own country isn’t expected to make the world less violent.

There are things we can not control. We can not control people’s feelings or emotions, but we can control the power that we give certain people with certain emotions. We can control providing people with weapons that we know have the power to be used for mass destruction, for killing precious and innocent lives, yet we do not.

We blame it on politics, on race, on socioeconomic status, on physical and mental well-being. Boy, do we blame it on mental health. But people’s thoughts don’t harm others, their actions do.

Of course, people can kill people. It makes sense. These weapons and tools need an operator behind them in order to function. Guns do kill people too, though. They give power to people to cause mass destruction. They are created to use in order to hurt others. No one ever bought a gun with the intention of using it as an eating utensil or a shower apparatus.

The debate over gun control is not a matter of political party or economic class; it is a matter of caring about humanity, a matter of morality. Because when we have the lives of so many individuals at risk, we need to come together. We need to become one.

As one, we can invoke change. We live in such a hyperconnected world, where news of widespread violence and destruction does not differentiate based on what political ideals you hold. When events like this happen, we tend to deviate from each other as much as possible, to point out the differences in political views and social beliefs and polarize the community.

This is where the problem lies. We need to come together as a single community, despite our differences, to support those experiencing such torture in order to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Because it’s less about blame and more about corroboration. Whoever the victimizer is, whatever the scenario is, whichever circumstances exist in which the scenario takes place will be obsolete if we focus all the effort and energy used to separate ourselves in times of despair to implementing laws that limit the possibility of these events occurring.

It doesn’t matter if someone has a gun for self-protection, because if someone wants to hurt or kill you that badly, they will follow measures to ensure that a weapon won’t be so readily accessible to prevent that.

And it’s hard to put such a large problem in such a short reading. It’s hard to put both the problem, the reaction, the result (or lack thereof) and my feelings towards it all into words because I am fortunate enough to have been reported safe throughout the several atrocities that this country has endured. Yet I still feel saddened and heartbroken and confused and scared and helpless.

And for that, I cannot imagine what those affected by such tragedies feel. But I shouldn’t have to feel saddened and heartbroken and confused and scared and helpless because I should be confident that the recurrence of these events would promote the importance of change and motivate us as a society to fulfill our duties to implement those changes quickly.

It’s not only the person’s fault. It’s not only the gun’s fault. It’s the accessibility and lack of simple restrictions on weapons that these events keep occurring. With the same action and the same reaction happening almost every time we go to bed at night and wake up in the morning, at what point will the results begin to change?