I was only a child on September 11th, 2001 so the majority of the events that took place that day, I have no recollection of. But each and every year that we mark the anniversary of the date, myself, along with my peers, get a taste of what it was like -- although that could never do it justice.

At that point, terrorist attacks were few and far between. By 2002, the year only totaled 982 attacks. That number rose rapidly to 4,564 attacks in the 2011, resulting in over 7,473 deaths. In only nine years, we -- humans as a whole -- reached a three hundred and sixty-four percent increase in the number of terror attacks occurring around the world.

Still young and eager to experience the world, I could never understand why my mother was concerned about me doing just that. Terror had won in my household, as I’m sure it did in many American households at the time. To this day, the discussion of all of the places I want to see in the world only comes in the form of an argument; visiting the city only fifteen minutes outside of my front door becomes something to be worried about. I had such a hard time trying to understand the concerns that my parents had when I left the house to attend a concert and why going to Firefly this past year was something that made them so uneasy.

Many people say that our society has become desensitized to massacres and mass shootings and children and innocent men and women dying; that could not be further from the truth in my eyes. Growing up, I never imagined that I would be alive to experience any of these terrible occurrences because it seems like something that would only happen once in a lifetime. And then, one day, I found myself sitting on my bus on my way back home from a long day at school hearing kids chattering about a shooting that took place in Connecticut.

All it took was to open a new tab on my phone and go to Google to hear that twenty kids who, at the time, were half my age didn’t get to sit on their bus and wait to go home that day. For the first time, my heart ached for those families who lost their children. For the first time, I realized why my mother worried sending me off every morning and why it was so important to say “I love you” back each time I left the house. The drills that we rehearsed once a month had a significance like they never did before.

This feeling presented itself no less shockingly the year that I found myself sitting outside at the 2013 Penn Relays watching my high school track team compete. The chatter began like it always does, and I found myself pacing the field, wondering what had happened. My stomach knotted and fell to what seemed like an abyss when we got wind that there was a bombing at the Boston Marathon. Those who lost their lives started their day no different than those of us sitting on the bleachers, watching our peers race around the tracks reaching to cross the finish line. That day we all were forced to realize how easily this can happen to any of us.

Oddly enough, I felt as though I could connect to these events because they seemed to correspond with the time I was at in my life. This was solidified by the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. This marked the time I had begun going out with friends as young adults. We all could resonate with the victims (although we could never imagine what they had been through) because we knew that could have been any of us who were out enjoying a night “out on the town.”

It seemed as though it didn’t matter how many times this happened, it didn’t matter how many innocent lives were taken. I felt it just as deeply each and every time, no less of a shock than the last time. Even so, it didn’t matter how close to home these attacks came, or how likely it was that it could’ve happened to me, I wasn’t afraid and I don’t think any of my peers were either. This could have very well been the mentality that all young adults have of “it cannot happen to me” but for one reason or another, this time it hit home.

My peers and I have been alive for the headline that goes something like “Biggest Mass Shooting in American History” three times now. This is not an argument of gun control or public safety or human rights at all for the matter. This is an argument of humanity. How someone could kill dozens of people-- with the attention of killing more, I’m sure-- is a concept I am so far from being able to grasp that it is incomprehensible.

If you have yet to figure out where I’m going with this, it’s to Las Vegas, Nevada. Regardless of where you stand politically, there is an overall sense of regret in our country today and hopefully, that feeling will stick around for each day to follow… for how could we (humans, as a whole) allow this to happen AGAIN? There is absolutely no excuse for another mass murder of innocent people to take place. And the question is raised, for good reason, of how the hell? this man was able to carry enough artillery into a hotel room in the first place.

I am not a politician, psychologist or investigator. Hell, I don’t even have a bachelor's yet, so I can’t offer answers any more helpful than the next guy. But compassion and sympathy and remorse are not built in an academy or scholarly foundation at all. These qualities are created at home, within ourselves and through those which we spend our time. It does not take an educated man or woman to understand that this cannot happen without reason and to understand that suspects of committing these terrible acts will never have a reason good enough to justify killing an innocent man, woman or child. Each man or woman who lost their lives from 9/11, Sandy Hook, Pulse Nightclub and now at a country concert in Las Vegas is a child, a mother, a father, a wife or a husband.

SO, instead of entertaining the argument that is now nationwide about whether we should have stricter gun laws or not, let’s focus our attention on doing whatever needs to be done to prevent this from happening again. Four times is four too many and granted, this is only an opinion of my own but, the side of the argument that will lessen the odds of this ever happening again is the side I stand on. Talking matters none until action is taken. We can only hope the action is taken before even a single other life is lost to terrorism