A pile of books and planners haphazardly stacked on the teacher's desk. The faint dust of white chalk sprinkled on the floor beneath the chalkboard. Scarlet red blood pooling around a young man's head as he lay sprawled on the floor while his fellow classmates cower in the corner of the room, mourning in silence for fear of being targeted next.

This tragic scene is no longer just a twisted fantasy. Sadly, in the face of an exponentially growing amount of school shootings across the nation, this may very well be the future of American education.

There has been, on average, 1 school shooting every week in 2018. Moreover, after Sandy Hook, widely viewed as a national tragedy that should be prevented from ever being repeated, more than 400 people have been shot in over 200 school shootings. These statistics only add to the fact that school shootings and gun violence, particularly in American classrooms, is a growing and worrisome epidemic that is spreading like wildfire.

And what do we do about it? We watch the footage—of the survivors being escorted out of the building, of crying parents, even secretly recorded videos shot by the students that document the carnage as it unfolds before them. We watch, we shake our heads, mutter "what a tragedy" and go on with our daily lives as we try to forget the fact that entire communities have been rocked and irreparably rattled by senseless brutality.

We let our children die, but not before splaying it across television headlines and extensive news coverage detailing every single detail, down to the type of guns and bullets used.

America has always had a morbid fascination with tragedy and violence—just tune in to Investigation Discovery, which documents hundreds of thousands of true crime stories of serial killers and murders and their motives 24/7. Interest in such things is not unnatural, as it appeals to a more primal part of human instinct—untapped potential to kill, to commit evil atrocious acts that the average individual wouldn't dare follow through with.

This fascination only becomes harmful when hundreds of people suffer through predictable yet horrific tragedies in environments that should be safe zones (i.e., the classroom), and all we do in response and is follow up on the details with morbid curiosity.

The time has come to talk about preventative measures to ensure that the new generation shouldn't have to accept lockdown drills as the norm, even if they are necessary. Whether this means talking about gun control or the structure of the school setting itself is up to America to decide.

But consider this—guns do not, by themselves, kill people. People kill people.

And people can save people if we only extend our efforts to make a change.