In early October, I wrote an article about my belief that the United States needs gun control, and we need it now. At the time, my worry was fairly academic. I knew these shootings were happening, I knew that they were atrocities, and I knew that stricter gun control could help cut down on the number of mass shootings we have as a country.

Then, Saturday night, a man with a semi-automatic weapon shot 9 people, killing 6, in three different locations in Kalamazoo Country

I'm originally from a town about 30 minutes away from Kalamazoo, Battle Creek. During my freshman year of college, my family moved 40 minutes north to the very edge of Kalamazoo County. Now, every day, my siblings attend a public school in the town of Richland, where the night's first (and thankfully non-fatal) shooting occurred.

To give a brief synopsis (based on this Wood TV8 article), the shootings took place in three different Kalamazoo County locations over the span of several hours: the first just outside a town home complex in Richland, MI, the second in the parking lot of a Kalamazoo Seelye Ford Kia showroom, and the third in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Texas Township. The Richland woman and a 14-year-old girl in the Cracker Barrel parking lot both survived, but the others were not so lucky. All three events were seemingly random, and nobody knows of any possible motive, if there was one at all. As far as we know, these poor people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sunday night, as I was talking to my friends who live in Kalamazoo and finally making sure that they were okay, one of them mentioned that they heard that another shooting had happened in Western Michigan's fraternity quad.

Two days in a row, my smallish city of 100,000 people was the site of shootings because guns are so easily accessible in the United States. Two days in a row, college students (and my friends) had to hide in their apartments because it wasn't safe to go outside because multiple people had guns and wanted to prove a point by using them.

I ended my last gun control article with the phrase "[the US] needs to reform its gun policy because there is no need for another family to grieve the loss of its father, mother, son or daughter due to a gunshot." Well, that was four months ago, and there are now multiple families grieving after Saturday night's senseless tragedy. Without reform, the shootings won't stop, and tragedies like this Saturday will continue to happen.