At 1:08 a.m. on June 12, 2016, I finished brushing my teeth and went to bed. Before turning out the light, I checked my phone one last time.

At 1:09 a.m. on June 12, 2016, I received the following CNN mobile notification: “Gunfire erupts at a nightclub in Orlando early Sunday, with several injuries reported.” ‘How tragic’ I thought to myself, shaking my head, that yet another shooting had taken place.

At 1:10 a.m. on June 12, 2016, with maybe a slightly heavier heart than I had carried two minutes sooner, I sighed, turned off my light, and fell asleep soundly—without even a second thought about the horrors of the Orlando shooting or the victims affected by it.

And unfortunately, this has become a far too common practice in my life and in every other American’s. We hear the news, send our thoughts and prayers, post on social media, provide our sympathies, and then just as easily forget about the terrible event that just took place. Even now, with our sensationalist mindsets, we’ve become obsessed with the desire for revenge and justice for the fifty dead and over fifty more injured at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida...and in the meantime we’ve already stopped discussing the murder of singer Christina Grimmie or the campus shooting at UCLA that happened just last week, along with the hundreds of others. Our nation’s noted increase in violence has not brought a necessary change—it instead has simply allowed us to accommodate this senseless violence and label it as an inevitability.

This particular tragedy is one of the most multifaceted of all recent ones, bringing up a range of sensitive topics from LGBT rights to terrorism. Law enforcement seems to be obsessed with finding the reason behind the actions of the killer and terrorist. We know that the murderer pledged allegiance to ISIS, but how deep was his allegiance to the growing terrorist organization? Was it an organized crime plotted by a network of individuals? Did he work alone? Was it a coincidence that the targeted location was a popular nightclub among members of the LGBT community? Was it a hate crime?

And while they try to find out whether this scenario is a result of terrorist networks or distorted homophobia, I don’t understand why the two are expected to be mutually exclusive. Yes, this was an act of terror, no, that does not mean it was religiously affiliated, and yes, it was a carefully planned hate crime against the LGBT community. And these aspects are branched together by nothing but gun violence. Gun violence is the issue that keeps coming up on our news feeds and TVs every other day, the issue that we seem to be becoming frighteningly unaffected by. Gun violence has taken lives in Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, California; and Newtown, Connecticut; yet we still don’t seem to be making any change.

All of these massacres have created national outcries, none of which have been met by progress. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens such as myself make online statements and are criticized for being “all talk”. I realize that this very written statement will have zero impact on any type of social or political change whatsoever. We already know that our thoughts and our prayers will not bring back those who have lost their lives to the increasingly ignored violence. But it appears to be that those thoughts and prayers, as ineffectual as they are, are the only impact people seem to have upon the damage following these common atrocities, because, after every single tragedy, we do—to say it simply—absolutely nothing.

Yes, I understand the impact of the NRA on our politics. Yes, I understand your right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment. The only thing I don’t understand is why thousands of people have to die in gun related violence, and why change is made impossible, every time, due to the gun lobby and the resulting political stalemate.

I am

sick of hearing about the crimes and ignorances of homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, terrorism, among others. For even though the United States insists that it will never bow down to a threat, it seems that we, as a nation, have already succumbed to a culture of fear and hate, proven by the fact that we continue to provide individuals with the deadly tools to follow through accordingly.