All of a sudden a bullet whizzes past, killing an innocent student. As people look around to see where the petrifying noise came from, bullets keep raining down on the student body. Once they come to their senses and realize what is happening, they start screaming and running for their lives. The shooter is finally found and taken into custody, but only after so many students’ lives were taken.

Sadly, this has become a reality in the US. According to The Telegraph, there were 346 mass shootings in 2017, which averages to almost one every day. Is this really the world we want to live in? Where is our initiative to fix the problem and reform the country? Changing gun laws has been a controversial topic for years, but it is time to take a stand.

So many people own guns because they hunt or just because they make them feel safer, but why do we need military level guns for these things? In the recent school shooting in Florida, the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was using an AR-15 which has been used in 13 other shootings. In fact, according to the NY Times, there is a three day waiting period for buying a handgun while you can simply walk in and out with an AR-15 after a few minutes of waiting to clear a background check. Despite the number of tragedies this gun has caused, the government has refused to ban it.

According to the US Department of Justice, there have been approximately 11,385 deaths due to gun homicide annually between 2001 and 2011 compared to the 31 deaths annually due to terrorism disregarding the 9/11 tragedy. Yet the government and the public have been focusing all of their attention on terrorism and putting the blame on other countries when they should be trying to fix the growing problem at hand.

People say that the problem is not the guns but the person behind the gun, but without a gun Nikolas Cruz wouldn’t have been able to kill 17 people in such a small period of time. Changing the gun laws may not end the problem but it could minimize it.

There has been 374 mass shootings in 2017. This number is far too high, but these tragedies are not the NRA’s fault, as many people claim. Yes, these are horrible occurrences that should be prevented at any cost. But, in the words of sophomore Maham Khanum, “If someone wants to kill someone, not having guns is not going to stop him or her”. This is a common argument for keeping gun regulations the same. These mass shootings have changed the way we view life in the United States for the rest of our lives. We walk into schools, concerts, movie theaters terrified that we won’t walk out. This is also not the fault of the NRA.

At 18 years old, in Florida, you can legally purchase an AR 15 rifle, a weapon of war. This is obviously a problem. Nikolas Cruz cannot drink but he can buy a military level weapon. Any criminal who has enough strategy could find a weapon of the same caliber. Criminals don’t follow laws or regulations, so changing them would really not do anything.

In 2018 alone, there have been 34 school shootings, according to gunviolencearchive.org. These shootings have ranged from California to the District of Columbia, from Texas to Michigan. Twenty seven million guns were sold in 2016, according to the New York Daily News. That number is awfully high but there were not that many mass shootings. Gun regulations are perfectly suitable currently for a hunter. They’re lax for criminals. The small percentage of the population should ruin commerce for the people who use guns for a good purpose? People also can use rope to murder, but there are no regulations on rope. Regulations just serve to drive a stake between the people and the government, leading to distrust, anarchy, and violence, which defeats the whole purpose of changing the regulations from the state of them now.

There is clearly a problem in the country, but the problem does not lie in the NRA or gun regulations. The problem lies in the humans who take advantage of loopholes in the regulations.