On March 14th, students in schools all around the nation participated in a school walkout. The purpose? To make a statement about the recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and about the other shootings in various schools across the country. The walkout was a way to show respect and remember those killed in Parkland a month earlier.

It was a symbolic 17 minutes, one minute per student or staff member killed. If the time frame represented all of the people killed in major school shootings since Columbine in 1999, the students would have walked out for a total of 284 minutes.

The fact that students in this generation are growing up and seeing these shootings so frequently is scary.

Shootings seem almost normalized, since they happen so often. No one should have to go to school and be scared of being shot, but that's what life is like today in our nation. And we have got to do something about it.

A huge concern of a lot of people is the mental health of the people accessing these guns. The state of our country's mental health system is difficult. Often times, the people who need mental health help the most are unable to access it, whether it's for financial reasons or other personal reasons. This lack of access allows mental issues to fester, which can then explode in extreme ways, as we've seen.

It's possible that requiring mental health testing before allowing someone to purchase a gun could prevent people who are mentally unstable from buying a gun. They would not be able to buy one legally, and it would be more difficult for them to find one to illegally purchase than if they could buy one legally. If even one shooting is prevented, if even one life is saved, then I think that's a success.