I'm done with school shootings. They make my skin crawl. I think about how kids, teenagers, and young adults keep waking up to go to school, and then not coming home. The worst part of it all? This is becoming the norm in America.

We're halfway through the second month of the year, and there have been eighteen school shootings. That's a major problem.

My mom is a Pre-Kindergarten teacher. She has been her entire life. Some people say that teachers should be receiving training in how to arm themselves to defend their students against potential gunmen. Here's the problem with that.

Guns don't kill people. People use guns to kill people. I cannot imagine my mom using a gun to kill a gunman. What lesson does that teach the four-year-olds, the ones who are going to be hit hardest by this ordeal, about how to be a good person?

Are those kids going to learn more from seeing their teacher wield a gun? To me, using a gun against a gun is just the easy way out. If I knew my teachers had a gun in their desk, I wouldn't feel any safer. The gunman could still come. People could still die. The gun in my teacher's desk isn't going to stop it.

I recently had a conversation where somehow someone brought rape into the gun debate. Although I was furious about it, I did find an analogy that summed up how I feel about the situation.

In attempting to combat rape culture, we are trying to change society's mindset from assuming girls should be more wary of what the wear because "boys will be boys" to holding men accountable for their unprovoked and aggressive responses to women, no matter what they're wearing. Rape is never the survivor's fault.

Now apply that same logic to the gun debate. Don't introduce guns into schools and train teachers to use them. Train society to be more careful about who can get a gun, where they can get it from, and what qualifies them to have it. Don't perpetuate the issue. Change the discourse around it.

The mental health debate over gun usage is something else that really hits home for me. Suddenly, a white terrorist, yes I am referring to shooters as terrorists, is diagnosed with a specific mental illness after a shooting occurs. The information comes out, and society takes two steps back in understanding the stigma around mental illness.

Being mentally ill doesn't make you shoot up a school. Not all people with diagnosed mental illnesses are crazy. Just because I suffer from a mental illness, people don't assume I'm going to pick up a gun and start opening fire when I show up to class on Monday.

I don't have the answer for how to stop this. I wish I did. All I do know is that we need to switch the focus from protecting "individual rights to bare arms" to protecting innocent children who are just trying to go to school and learn and see their friends.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to worry that someone is going to walk into my mom's classroom and try to hurt her and the little kids she teaches. So start protecting her and those kids. But don't say that putting a gun in her hand is the solution.