Dear Americans,

“We’ve become numb to this.”

With those words, our country’s leader pointed out the unfortunate truth last week about how mass killings throughout the United States have become a common occurrence. So common that when we discuss with one another the horrifying shooting that occurred last week in Oregon at Umpqua Community College, or the shootings that took place this week at Northern Arizona University and at Texas Southern University, most of us react with, “Whoa…there was another shooting?,” shake our heads and continue to go about making conversation about something else.

With those words, President Obama made it clear that the half of our country that is in favor of restricting the gun laws is very near giving up, while the other half of our country has become more defiant than ever to make sure their rights to keep arms are intact. Three years ago, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting rampage, President Obama had managed to spark some hope in all of our abilities to create some sort of change regarding all of this by saying, “…we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” Well, here we are in 2015, and we’ve had even more tragedies all too similar to the one that occurred at Sandy Hook, or the one that happened in a Colorado theater--the list goes on. Here we are, unable to take any meaningful action because we’re all holding each other back.

How is it that after so many mass shootings, there are still people out there holding signs that say that their land is not a gun-free zone in response to talks that gun control sales may be tightened by requiring background checks on those who want to purchase guns. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that it’s impossible to get all of us, citizens, residents, from all 50 states, to happily agree on one way to effectively control gun laws. But maybe that’s where the problem lies. While political powerhouses are sitting around trying to figure out a way to please all of us, everyone else is tallying how many mass murders (or attempts even) have occurred within the last month. It seems that all of this effort and energy is going towards something that ends up back at square one. Clearly this plan isn’t working.

Could it ever be possible for us to instead come together to ask for, to demand, that we get the resources needed to ensure our safety? If it’s not going to happen in the form of tightened gun laws, then can we at least get better security on college campuses, where the police aren’t just patrolling around in their cars, looking for suspicious behavior from a distance? In fact, let’s just start petitioning to put up bulletproof doors, and weapon-detectors (basically tons of airport level security) in every public space building! But then I realized that, oh right, that’s all impossible too. In fact, that’s plain crazy. This is where some of you are shaking your heads thinking that none of this is possible in reality. And that’s true, we’ll never get the ideal country where those in favor of guns and those who don’t understand the glory in owning a weapon will agree. We’ll never get the ideal country where politicians just make the one right moral decision (whichever that may be) without worrying about pleasing everyone, because that wouldn’t make it a democracy. What all of this really means is, in an effort to write something meaningful and try to ignite the immediate need for change among us, is that I’ve also reached square one. I don’t know what else can be done to prevent such further tragedies. Do you?

But this brings me to the point after such mass shootings where the news, and social media, and certain personnels try to reinforce the association between these heinous crimes and the issue of mental illness. Everyone tries to depict these shooters the same way: as misfits, as recluses, as ones with histories of personality disorders, or some sort of psychological issue. My issue with always associating “mental illness” with these instances of murder is that a) it continuously re-establishes the stigma of being mentally ill, which does a disservice to many individuals who will probably never even pick up a gun but do suffer from severe anxiety, or depression, or schizophrenia, etc.; and b) it has become an excuse, the go-to explanation for why what happened did. That’s just unacceptable. I’ve come to understand that there’s nothing that all of us can really do to literally bring change to the table, but what we can do is take a stand to stop making constant associations between mental illness and shooting rampages. We can, as a society, as a whole, make a point to stop resorting to the excuse that the shooters' being mentally ill will explain the many murders that have taken place--because in resorting to such an excuse we have lost the main issues regarding gun laws, and our security.

I suppose, in gathering all of my thoughts about the recent shooting sprees, I’ve come to conclude that we are quite limited in our abilities to act as citizens, and take meaningful steps to prevent more tragedies. Yet at the same time, I don’t feel as hopeless. While it’s true that for the most part we’ll just have to continue going about our lives, we can also, as members of our society together, work to stop fueling the excuses constantly used to explain these acts of violence. In turn, we can then also work together to stop giving certain people a reason to resort to violence. But that’s all I’ve got in the moment.