About two weeks ago, an article from The Washington Post was released with a series of statistics about gun violence in schools. The headline reads: “2018 Has Been Deadlier for Schoolchildren than Service Members.” Our first instinct is to deny this. It can’t be true because there’s just no way.

Sadly, it is possible, and it has happened.

Members of "The Washington Post" spent over a year gathering and analyzing information about school shootings in America as well as service member deaths that occurred. The results were compiled into these three graphs.

I was startled to find that the Washington Post's data extended to more than just comparison stats, but to how many children were affected by gun violence in schools since the Columbine High School shooting.

The answer: 214,000 children.

The statistics get more and more intense, crunching and breaking down the numbers further and further.

They even have a bar highlighted in black that says “The Most Recent School Shooting Happened _____."

Everyone keeps asking the same questions:

“How long must this go on before we do something about it?”

“How can we stop this?”

“Why has this become an American norm?”

“When will this stop?”

This past semester, I took a class called “Culture, Communication, and Rhetoric.” Truthfully, I didn’t expect anything to come out of the class. But, it was at the end when I realized that I did get something out of it.

We had been reviewing the concept of simple words with complex meanings, also known as an essentially contested concept. This means that we have a general understanding that these events exist and that they are important, yet we can’t actually define them. We can’t truly say specifically what it is, but we know it when we see it.

To label gun violence as an essentially contested concept seems wrong. However, we don’t have many other options to call it other than horrifying, disgusting, and tragic.

Gun violence has many definitions. It can be defined as any incident involving a gun, someone wrongfully using a gun; someone illegally using a gun, purchasing and using a gun to assassinate innocent people. The list of definitions goes on forever.

After putting thought into it, I realized that as much as we don’t want to believe it, safety is an essentially contested concept. We clearly know where and what it looks like. We try to understand how these shootings have happened and why, but often don’t get an answer. We get some pieces, but the puzzle is ultimately left unfinished.

We try to get answers as to why this happens, what we can do to make everywhere safer, and how we can stop it. However, it may be far too complex than we think. We could try gun reform or banning them all together, but the beauty of essentially contested concepts is that they don’t have simple, obvious answers.

We see it when it happens and we send thoughts and prayers and hearts and roses, but nothing has truly changed the concept of gun violence.

Before the next school shooting, define your concept of safety. Determine if there is truly any place that is safe, and if there is truly anyone that is safe.

In a world of gun violence, what does safety mean?