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Another School Shooting

What kind of world do we live in? What kind of madness are we willing to continue accepting as a nation? It's crazy to watch these school shootings happen again and again and our leaders just sit by and do nothing to deal with the problem. Some people think it's a gun control issue. Others feel it's something that we need to address with more mental health focus. Either way, we really need to come together and have meaningful discussions about the horrible events that continue happening to our children while at school.

When I was young, I never had to worry about being shot at school. School was always a safe place, where I felt encouraged and where I could enjoy spending time with  my friends and learning things that would help me later in life. I never had to worry about someone coming in with a weapon and harming me, my friends, or my teachers. What has changed? What has made people feel like schools are an easy target for mayhem and evil? It's really sad to think that this generation has had to deal with this not once or twice, but dozens of times over the past decade or so. Schools should be places of learning and enlightenment, not places where we have to worry about safety and security. Parents send their children to school and trust the administration and staff to keep them safe. It's really messed up that some parents will have to bear the pain of their children never coming home again from a tragedy that no one saw coming.

Is it mental illness or gun control that needs to be addressed? How about both. I've suffered from mental illness in my own life but I don't know what it feels like to want to take out my aggression on innocent children at school. I've tried to hurt myself before but I've never wanted to hurt other people who had nothing to do with my pain. I'm not a gun owner but my mother is and I believe in people's rights to own a firearm for protection, and even sport if that's what they're into. But I don't think it should be so easy to get a gun. I'm a felon, so I cannot buy a gun, and that's fine. I understand that things I've done in the past would probably make people uneasy at me owning a gun and that makes sense to me. But there are plenty of people out there who have committed no crimes that probably shouldn't be able to own guns either. But how do we determine who those people are?

We have a love affair with guns in this country that many other places don't have. People love the Second Amendment and they protect the right to own guns vehemently. I am not one that wants to take away anyone's right to own a gun, but I do think some guns shouldn't be available for public consumption. I don't know much about hunting, but I don't think people who value the sport really engage in shooting animals with semi-automatic weapons either, but still they exist in our country for some crazy reason. And some responsibility has to fall on our leaders and legislators for failing to act on some measure of gun control. Time after time they have sat by and watched massacres happen in our schools and at clubs or other public events and have done nothing to put stronger gun laws on the books. It bothers me that they seem so complacent and indifferent to what goes on in our nation when it comes to gun violence. They can bring up Chicago when they want to talk about the problems that guns cause, but they ignore these home grown terrorists who take full advantage of a failing system that allows things like this to happen over and over again.

The mental health aspect is an excuse. It's a way to divert attention from what's really going on in our country. There are millions of people who suffer from some sort of mental illness who manage not to commit mass murders. What causes these other people to do such horrible things? Maybe it's more of a parenting problem that we're facing than a mental health crisis. How do these teenagers get these guns, and why are they allowed to have them in their homes. Shit, when I was growing up I couldn't even have play guns, but somehow society has changed so much that young people are literally allowed to have weapons in the homes that they live with their parents in. To me that's just crazy as hell and it's something that needs to be talked about.

This latest tragedy in Florida is no more or less important or devastating than any of the other shootings that have occurred in the past few years. Some of them may touch or affect people a little more than others because of who was targeted or where they happened. Either way, we all mourn as a nation and I hope we get to a point where we decide not to tolerate this type of violence in our nation anymore. We have so many tools at our disposal and there are so many ways to control who is allowed to gain access to weapons that can destroy lives and cause such trauma. It's time to take action and I pray that someone who has the power to make some change steps up and starts a movement. We are a great nation and we're better than this.


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