Enough is enough

mocked the naïveté of the question: “No, there wasn’t.”

The reporter pressed: “Why so?”

Paige continued: “It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

Schools across the country are preparing for this morbid eventuality. According to a 2015-16 Crime and Safety Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 92 percent of public schools have a written plan describing procedures to be performed in the event of an shooter.

According to Vox:

“Since Columbine, 32 states have passed laws requiring schools to conduct lockdown drills or some form of emergency drill to keep students safe from intruders. Some states went even further after 20 children died in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Now, six states require specific ‘active shooter’ drills each year.”

These preparations have become a routine part of our children’s educational experience. This is not normal. Neither are these shootings normal. This is all insanity.

There are too many guns in the US, including too many based on combat weapons, and as a result we have too many shootings and deaths.

Many of us know this. We also know legislators in Washington, as well as Donald Trump himself, are so beholden to the National Rifle Association that little to nothing will be done.

Instead, politicians talk about tangential issues like the mentally ill, the “hardening” of soft targets like schools, and putting even more guns in people’s hands, like the lunacy of arming teachers.

As the Washington Post pointed out, Trump promised in his inauguration speech to end this “American carnage”, but “gun deaths are up over 12 percent year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased 16 percent, while instances of defensive gun use are up nearly 30 percent.”

Yes, gun violence is actually on the rise.

As Time magazine pointed out in November, “Firearm-related deaths rose for the second-straight year in 2016.” The magazine continued:

“In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the US – 4,000 more than 2015, the new CDC report on preliminary mortality data shows. Most gun-related deaths – about two-thirds – in America are suicides, but an Associated Press analysis of FBI data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015.”

But as politicians in Washington have made clear that they have no desire to address this issue, no desire to stand up to the NRA, no desire to stop treating these deaths as collateral damage, those seeking change must change tactics.

People seeking common sense gun control must become single-issue voters on