I can't remember a time when the thought of a mass shooting was foreign to me.

I remember when the Aurora Theater shooting happened. It was during a Batman movie in the summer of 2012. It happened in Colorado, but when my friend's parents went to see that same movie just a few days later in North Carolina, that friend cried. We were all sure that it could happen again.

I remember the day after Sandy Hook vividly. It was that same year, my freshman year of high school. I was attending an international school in Switzerland. Even still, the day after it happened, when we were all reading the news stories, a noticeable pall had fallen. The hallways were quieter and the emotions ran high, as we all considered the idea that so many children had died, and, perhaps more terrifying, that it could happen anywhere.

I remember in 2015, the shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a Bible study. My family was in Chicago, staying in a hotel. When we read the news, it made me nauseous. How could someone open fire on people in a Bible study? Was that not a place of sanctuary?

Those are the ones that stick most clearly in my mind, the ones that affected me most deeply. But there have been others, just as tragic if not more so. Last year, the Pulse Night Club in Orlando. That was declared the deadliest mass shooting in US history. And now, Las Vegas. That's the deadliest in history.

This form of terrorism is being normalized.

Every time this happens, people have the same response. And that response gets a little weaker each time, because we're getting used to it. We're used to the idea that this can happen, and that this does happen. We're all sad about it, but people just don't feel that same need to pull together that they do when it's a foreign national attacking Americans.

This is domestic terrorism. Terrorism is defined as being, "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians". Every shooting I've used certainly exemplifies the unlawful use of violence against citizens. And every single one invoked terror.

So why don't we band together the same way?

I think it has something to do with the way the US is now polarized into smaller groups, often partisan, but also groups that care only for a specific cultural or ethnic background, or a single group in society.

I argue that lives matter. Not "Blue Lives Matter", not "Black Lives Matter", not even "All Lives Matter." All of those have connotations. But I think we can all agree that lives matter.

948 lives have been lost since 1967 in mass shootings (defined as shooting of four or more people by one or two shooters).

Those lives matter. Those people had stories and experiences and things they wanted to give to the world. Just writing it off as "something that happens" is unacceptable.

What made those three shootings mentioned above so impactful for me was the fact that those people were in situations I often find myself in. What makes all of us, the non-victims, so lucky as to not be among those shot at an event in which we partake regularly?

That's just it: we are lucky. But if we continue to write this off as something that happens, as something that doesn't impact me because it was another group, because it was someone else's family... It's going to become more common.

I don't have answers, and I don't know what needs to be done. We're all grieving for our own reasons and in our own ways. What I do know is that what needs to be done is something besides this. Those lives matter. Because lives matter. And something needs to change, because we cannot continue to have new "deadliest mass shootings of all time."