In the wake of an attack like the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, people want to forget. They want to forget the anger and the fear and the sorrow that they have had to endure. They go around saying things like "We shouldn't give the attacker the attention. That's what he wants." Or maybe you've heard, "This was a lone wolf attack, the guy was unstable." While yes, I want to stop talking about mass murderers, and yes, they are in fact crazy, dismissing conversations about mass shootings in these ways prevents us from ever moving forward.

It's been time to move forward for a long time now – and yet we're in the same place we were three years ago, in the wake of another deadly shooting, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

There were mass shootings in the United States long before Newtown, and there have certainly been mass shootings since. We've seen mass shootings by men (and a handful of women) of different races and religions, with different backgrounds and different levels of mental stability. It can be tempting to write off each one of these perps as a "lone wolf" with mental issues – as in Newtown and Aurora – or as a religious extremist, like in Orlando (although this is a problematic assumption with regard to an attack that was motivated by anti-LGBT and anti-Latino hatred more than anything).

The easy way out of an uncomfortable conversation about guns and gun control is to say that no matter what we do, crazy people who want to commit murder will always find another way to do so. This makes every murderer seem like an individual anomaly, so that we have no responsibility for their actions. But the truth about every one of these mass shootings is that they have one thing in common: assault weapons.

"They'll just find another way"-ers applying their logic to the Newtown shooting officially dismissed any responsive gun control legislation, accepting as fact that the 21st century is just one in which we are no longer entitled to safety anywhere in the U.S. They imply that we can't expect to go to a movie theater, a nightclub, or even our children's elementary school without a reasonable expectation that there could be a mass shooting that day, so we might as well give up.

Give up trying to regulate a weapon that allows the shooter to fire off 20 rounds in just nine seconds. Keep available to the civilian public a weapon engineered for the military to "kill mass numbers of people with maximum efficiency and ease," requiring no training or even the most basic of background checks.

They say that without an assault weapon in hand, shooters in Newtown and Aurora and Orlando still could have walked into these places of sanctuary and killed people. I agree with that. People can murder with a handgun, too. But what we need to consider is this: without that assault rifle, they absolutely would not have been able to kill so many people so incredibly quickly.

They also say that banning these weapons will not actually take them out of the population – that murderers will simply start buying the guns illegally instead. They use this faulty logic to argue that no gun control measure, even the most basic like the four recently defeated in the Senate, could possibly be effective. Gun control, they say, is useless and doesn't actually stop would-be mass murderers from obtaining these weapons and committing crimes.

In response, I'll point you to Australia. In 1996, a lone gunman shot and killed 35 people in a cafe. Immediately, the government bought back or confiscated over a million firearms. Since that shooting 20 years ago, Australia has had zero mass shootings. Zero.

What the American people are asking for is not even an Australia-scale buyback program of all firearms. We just don't want assault rifles on our shelves. We're asking for some kind – any kind – of background check or waiting period or training required to possess high-grade weaponry. America is a different country than Australia, and its programs might not completely work for us. But what Australia does prove is that gun control measures are effective in preventing mass shootings. And at this point, I'll settle for knowing that no one is legally walking around my neighborhood with a military-grade assault rifle.

There is absolutely no reason that a civilian needs a military-grade weapon in their home or in their hands. Just ask Congressman Seth Moulton, who carried it during his four active-duty tours in Iraq. By owning this gun, you are saying that enjoy having the power to kill as many living beings as quickly as possible, as effectively as possible, and as accurately as possible.

No one – myself included – is trying to take away your hunting guns, or your handguns for home protection. Those guns are not the problem. America's problem is the military-grade weaponry that until recently was even sold at Walmart. America's problem is that it puts the wants of gun owners and gun organizations like the NRA above the safety of its citizens.

As a society, the day we saw the murder of 20 schoolchildren and did not pass gun control legislation was the day we decided that murder is acceptable in this country. It was the day our legislators decided to work in the interest of their own NRA-cash-filled wallets instead of the people they are elected to represent. Newtown was the day America's gun control debate ended. Even the brief glimmers of hope in the wake of Orlando – four basic gun control measures and a Democratic sit-in – were extinguished in favor of a House of Representatives vacation. This was the day that we decided that thoughts and prayers were more effective than actual, tangible change.

It's time to stop ignoring the common denominator in all of these attacks. It's time to stop saying that murderers will just find another way to commit murder. We may not be able to stop all future killers, but we sure as hell can stop putting the murder weapon right in their hands.