Thoughts and Prayers Are Not a Policy to End Mass Shootings

School has gotten more difficult for students in recent years. Competitive pressures have increased, college acceptance rates have gone down, and inequalities between schools have risen.

Each year in Florida, where I grew up, we sat through active shooter drills just as often as we prepared for hurricanes.

But students today face many challenges beyond maintaining their GPAs. I graduated high school two years ago at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but the challenges we faced then are now magnified among current students. My generation has had to grapple with record-low mental health rates, racism in our curriculum, and a worldwide pandemic that sent us out of brick-and-mortar schools and into endless Zoom sessions, worsening our isolation and loneliness.

And after last month, we're once again called upon to confront another concern that affects the very existence of our futures: gun violence.

Each year in Florida, where I grew up, we sat through active shooter drills just as often as we prepared for hurricanes. We watched headlines of school after school being hit by tragedy. We witnessed the construction of wire fences around our school as a superficial form of safety.

What we didn't see, however, was meaningful policy change. Then, on May 24, 2022, there was news of yet another school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas, that took the lives of nineteen elementary students and two teachers.

Between the time I began kindergarten in 2008 and my high school graduation in 2020, a total of 257 school shootings occurred in the United States. In 2019, three years after the massacre at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, my hometown, and one year after the Parkland, Florida, shooting, I wrote an essay for The Progressive highlighting the persistent fear and frustration students face as we watch headline after headline tell the same painful story.

Now, in 2022, I'm disappointed to write that little has tangibly changed even as many more have fallen victim to gun violence.

Tens of thousands of students have protested, marched, called their representatives, and advocated for gun reform in new and unique ways. This youth-led movement has been extensively covered in the media and commended by progressive organizations and by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The GOP and the NRA, meanwhile, have not lent an ounce of respect to these young activists fighting for their lives, nor to public opinion which stands clearly in favor of gun control.

Across decades and political administrations, gun violence has persisted as one of the nation's biggest issues. But gun violence is only a symptom of another issue: political inaction.

I'm in college now, studying public and international affairs at Princeton University, but I've stopped reading the news as often as I used to. It's always the same thing: an existing issue reveals itself, promises of change are made, and said change is delayed and delayed until the issue once again rears its head through an unimaginable tragedy.

I wonder, is this exactly what some politicians hope for? That these tragedies happen again and again until we can't be made to care anymore, so that they can sit in their ivory towers without any responsibility to their constituents?

The issue of gun violence is as transparent as it can be--45,222 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2020, more than any other year on record. On average, there is one mass shooting per day and roughly 110 people are killed by gun violence daily in our country. On a ranking of developed countries by gun violence deaths, we stand at the top, with about five times the number of per capita deaths as the next country.

Gun violence, which the Centers for Disease Control defined as a public health crisis, has now become the top cause of death for children across the United States. And, like any other disease, it hurts the most vulnerable members of our society: women and gender minorities, LGBTQ+ people, communities of color, and youth.

These communities are disproportionately likely to face domestic violence and hate crimes, which are often fueled by firearms. Two-thirds of intimate partner homicides in the United States involve guns. The same is true of hate crimes, 10,300 of which involve guns in an average year.

One of the main reforms that experts and advocates have pushed for is a federal ban on assault weapons, that countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have successfully implemented through government buyback programs.

Semi-automatic weapons were used in many of the mass shootings throughout the United States, including in Uvalde and Parkland. When an assault weapons ban was in place from 1994 to 2004, mass shooting rates were significantly lower than the decades before and after the ban. Overwhelming support also exists for universal background checks, but a majority of states have yet to implement these.

We need comprehensive reform that limits the circulation of assault weapons and promotes responsible gun ownership in our country. We need to raise awareness about the dangers of loose regulations that mitigate the likelihood of violence.

To reduce gun violence, we must also work to prevent the sort of radicalization that leads to hate crimes like the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and at the Pulse Nightclub.

This requires more funding to educate young people and communities about racial and social justice. It also involves stronger regulation of the misinformation and hate speech that festers on social media.

But if any of these changes are going to pass, we can't ignore the structural reform that is needed within our political system. Federal gun control legislation has so far failed to pass not because a majority of Senators opposed it--in 2013, fifty-four Senators from both parties voted in favor of background checks--but because of the filibuster, which requires sixty votes for a bill to become law.

The filibuster has lent disproportionate power to a minority of our country's population in small, rural states, preventing not only the passage of gun regulation, but also many other important bills that could improve all of our lives. We must also support campaign finance reform that limits the power of the NRA, the gun lobby, and other dark money groups in politics.

Across decades and political administrations, gun violence has persisted as one of the nation's biggest issues. But gun violence is only a symptom of another issue: political inaction. That issue might hide stealthily below the surface, but it's one toward which we must target our frustration and rage.

I did not see the change I hoped for when I graduated high school two years ago, but I beg that the same is not true by the time I graduate college in 2024.

Thoughts and prayers do not bring people back from the dead. They do not erase the trauma--physical and mental--that survivors must endure for the rest of their lives. What we owe to these individuals and to our entire country is to prevent these tragedies from occurring again.

I won't claim that ending this epidemic is going to be easy, but it shouldn't be nearly so difficult when we have the science and the data ready to deliver a cure.