Friday night, hundreds of people gathered in a small Orlando concert venue to see Christina Grimmie perform as an opener for her friends in a band called Before You Exit. The median age range for their fan base is fourteen to twenty-five. There were dozens in line to meet her when her life was senselessly taken from her, with a gun fired by a twenty-seven-year-old man. Now, a family and a music community are left to grieve while America wonders what they are to do next. Then, Saturday night rolled around in Orlando. Fifty gay night club goers were killed, and now we are left with an even more intense need to discuss what we have been pushing off for too long.

We need a change in America.

We can't pretend this isn't about guns anymore because it is. Two shooting incidents where innocent people were killed in a matter of 48 hours, in the same region. That's more than most countries have in a week, some a month. There's a need for gun control in this country, although people will say that it's a religion thing, a "wrong place at the wrong time" type of situation. We can blame the security of the venues for so long before Uncle Sam looks into the mirror and realizes that there's blood on his hands, too. The government has been too lenient on getting laws passed that protect it's citizens from getting shot down. This is America, home of the free, where nobody should ever have to worry about going out at night and not coming home because of an assault rifle that a no-fly list recipient could pick up at Walmart.

To be fair, we did try. In April of 2013, we tried to ban the sale of firearms to people on the no-fly list, and by a 54-46 vote, it wasn't passed. Senators like former presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were in the majority to deny this to be passed. Then Independent senator Bernie Sanders was one of the forty-six that agreed on the ban, and our now presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump was hosting the 6th season of his reality television show The Celebrity Apprentice.

To say we have been unfair to our citizens by not allowing them the peace of mind and safety of being able to walk out of our houses to go to events without being shot down, is an understatement.

But, I'm not trying to say we should take the guns away. Guns are a security blanket for many families in this country and I understand that they might need them. The problem is that they become a safety concern when guns are put into the wrong hands. Nobody on the no-fly list should have access to buying weapons, the background checks have to be a lot more invasive. To the people who say this won't work, look at Hawaii. The gun laws in Hawaii are much better than anywhere in the other forty-nine states, and they have never had a mass shooting.

We just need to buckle down on the way guns are distributed and stored. Along with this, we need mental health treatment for anyone who may need it, we need to reduce the stigma and show everyone the signs of mental illness. People with mental illness are not all violent or dangerous but there are a few who would do harm to people and we need to be able to correct the problem before it turns into something bigger. We need a big change in America. How many children, teens, LGBTAQ+ need to die for us to understand that something really needs to be done?

Now, for those of you who will look down on your Muslim neighbors now that it has been confirmed that the shooter was a radical terrorist, please take into consideration that extremists are dangerous, but Muslim's are not. Please do not take this out on the people you work with, interact with and pass by every day. While Donald Trump congratulates himself on being right about the shooter being a radical terrorist who happened to be Muslim although born in America, my Muslim friends and yours share your pain over this event. I've had interactions with people in my life who won't talk near women in hijabs, who won't eat food cooked by hardworking Muslim men, who make jokes about tragedies at the expense of their Muslim colleagues or acquaintances. This needs to stop. We need to realize focus on the reason this was able to happen and why it continues to happen, not the religion of the person who executed it.

Most importantly in this time, we need to show our support to the LGBTQ+ community. During a time where they are supposed to be celebrating who they are, they should not be afraid to gather because someone might kill them. Especially in 2016, this homophobia should not be tolerated. There are so much judgment and generalization in the world today, people aren't able to live without some sort of fear.

People can point fingers all day long, but it won't bring back the 50 people killed at Pulse or Christina Grimmie. We need to focus on progressing as a nation so that our children do not have to grow up living in fear.