The recent Florida massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School makes us stop and think: Why? How have we even allowed such horrible situations to occur often? How have we watched so many people die and choose to do nothing about it?

Think about it. One of the reasons we have allowed this to happen is the fact that we allow citizens to purchase machine guns. Why should a mentally or emotionally unstable young person be able to own a killing machine? And the thing is, it’s probably not to protect themselves. People may argue that it’s part of their rights as a citizen. The problem is that those rights were created quite a while ago when it made sense for people to own guns. What do we have nowadays that poses such a dangerous threat that a teenager would need to own a gun? Nothing.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing two false lockdowns myself. We weren’t aware that these lockdowns weren’t real, and both situations really played with people’s emotions and made us think about what we would do if the situation occurred again. Students shouldn’t have to be scared walking from class to class or worry about whether they will run or hide, and where? School should only be for learning, and we should at least feel safe when doing so.

Some people believe that in order to solve such a problem, we should make sure that the teachers have guns in order to protect the students. This is also just another crazy idea that would not only make the classrooms less safe, but actually more dangerous. What if a student got a hold of the teachers gun, or the unexperienced teacher accidently shot one of the students? No, we need to eliminate this problem from its roots.

Besides the solution in the paragraph above, nothing is really being done to stop the problem. The reason is because companies that manufacture and sell guns still want to stay in business. What they’ll do is pay people in higher power to not to create laws that diminish the buying/and/or owning of guns. So, to fit everyone’s needs, we could just create a law that puts in filters for people buying guns so that guns don’t end up in the wrong hands. And so we don’t find ourselves reading another newspaper article about the killing of 17 highschool students.

In a utopian society, no-one would have guns. Without weapons, people wouldn’t feel the need to have one. Unfortunately, we live in a world were these situations are very present in our lives. We need to do something about this- we need to control the amount of guns being put into the world, the types of guns, and if we can, find a way to have better support for people so it doesn’t come to a point where people decided to pull out a gun and shoot.