Columbine High School near Denver, Colorado, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, north of Miami, Florida- two communities, two unforgettable days and two decades apart share the same tragedy and carry the same invisible scars around with them. Two high school shootings that left in a total of 30 lives gone. Will the government ever help?
Four former students and survivors of the Columbine shooting that happened 20 years ago traveled to Parkland to meet with four of their counterparts and speak with CNN's Brooke Baldwin. These individuals discuss the horrors they experience and how it continues to affect their lives.
Imagine sitting there — 20 years later after experiencing a massacre and telling four individuals from Parkland, "We're sorry we couldn't stop it." That sentence breaks my heart alone. They are apologizing for something that is out their own hands, apologizing for something that their government continues to fail time and time again.
When will the government provide its citizens with sensible gun laws?
This year alone, three individuals, two who experienced the shooting at Parkland and one being the father of 6 year-old-girl who was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting committed suicide. The trauma does not end when the shooting does- the trauma sticks with you, your family, and friends for the rest of their lives.
Since the shooting in New Zealand that killed 50 people, the government has banned semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles. It took this one mass shooting for New Zealand's government to jump into action and to find a way to make it harder for people to get their hands on weapons to avoid massacres.
Why can't our government do the same?
The families who have lost their loved ones in school shootings, the students who watched their classmates die, do not want thoughts and prayers. These people want action, they want sensible gun laws.
Thoughts and prayers are not enough- they do not stop the continuation of these school shootings that happening so often in the United States. They do not bring back their loved ones. They do not get rid of the trauma that sticks with you for the rest of their life. Thoughts and prayers are not enough to stop mass shootings.
No one should have to go to school and live in fear waiting for the day a school shooting could happen to them because it has become so normal in this nation for shootings to happen.
As we approach the 20-year mark of the Columbine shooting on the 20th of April 2019, an armed teenager was making threats that forced the closure of 19 school districts in Colorado. This woman was infatuated with Columbine shooting and all it took was for her to make threats and purchase a pump-action shotgun and ammunition once she landed in Colorado.
It should not be that easy to walk into a store to buy a simple gun. How many more lives need to be lost until our government does something? Why does our government continue to fail us when so many lives have been lost since the Columbine school shooting over the past 20 years?