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.