On April 10 at about 10:30 AM, a woman and a young boy were murdered at an elementary school in San Bernardino, CA. The shooter also injured another boy and killed himself. According to BBC, Cedric Anderson entered the school with the concealed gun, claiming that he was dropping something off to his wife who was a teacher at the school, Karen Elaine Smith. Upon entering her classroom, he opened fire, killing her, an eight-year-old boy named Jonathan Martinez, and injuring another boy. This isn’t the first time people have died due to gun incidents in schools. Gun violence has been a problem in our country for as long as I can remember.

I don’t often write something so opinionated because I know that I feel differently than a lot of people I grew up with. To be honest, I’m nervous about dealing with opposing reactions from people I care about. However, I feel like this situation is too terrible to ignore. No one deserves to have their lives cut short by senseless gun violence – especially not children.

I get it; a lot of people feel like it’s their right to have guns to hunt or keep their home and family safe. I just wonder why you need to carry them everywhere? I learned in my Social Psychology class this semester that the presence of weapons is shown to make people more aggressive. It’s called the weapons effect, and it's been replicated in many studies. Personally, I don’t think there’s a reason for someone to carry a gun around a public place unless that person is a police officer. I’ve heard people claim that if someone opened fire in a public place, they would grab their gun and go after the shooter. However, I don’t believe that anyone truly knows how they would respond in any emergency, including one like this. Logic is gone; the fight or flight response takes over. Anyone who has been caught in an emergency can testify to the fact that you don’t always react the way you think you’re going to.

People in our country have been desensitized to gun violence. This shooting isn’t getting as much attention as the Sandy Hook shooting a few years ago. Yes, it’s true that fewer people were killed, but the people killed in San Bernardino matter just as much as the people killed in other shootings. The victims had hopes and dreams; they had a family waiting for them to come home and tell them about their day. The students in that classroom watched their teacher get shot to death. They watched two of their classmates get shot. If they haven’t already, they’re eventually going to learn that one of them died. They watched the man who shot their teacher and classmates kill himself afterwards. These children are going to have to remember this for the rest of their lives. This single incident of gun violence changed so many lives forever. Our country is so used to hearing about incidents of gun violence that end up worse than this one, that we tend to brush smaller one’s under the rug. That’s extremely unfair to the victims of this shooting. They deserve respect. Really, they deserved not to get shot.

When will our country finally decide that enough is enough? When will we realize how many people wind up dead because of guns each year? There’s the saying, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but guns certainly make it a whole lot easier.