On November 5, 2017, a deranged lunatic opened fire on a small Baptist church during Sunday services in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a small town 40 miles east of San Antonio. As a result, the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, took the lives of 25 innocent people while they were celebrating their faith.

As you have may have noticed, the damning thing about this tragedy is that it happened just over a month from what has been the most recent mass shooting in Las Vegas. What could be the most damning about this is that despite the Las Vegas shooting happening on a dead, late Sunday night, its magnitude across social media was unprecedented, whereas in Texas, it seemed to make not as much ripples as Vegas did.

It is most certainly without question that the disgusting act in Sutherland Springs is something unfathomable to even imagine, just like any other massacre before it. But the fact that this latest act of gun violence has not had the same amount of concern as similar events before it tells us something even more vomit-inducing in this country: that we somehow allowed mass shootings to become the norm in America.

If you don’t believe me, then why is it when I received the first CNN alert on my phone about this shooting that I didn’t cringe reading it? Why didn’t I feel a strike of disbelief within me that something as shocking as this had ACTUALLY happened? Why did I feel that nearly every politician, mainly those on the right including Donald Trump, was going to say their thoughts and prayers are with those affected and then continue to move on as if nothing drastically bad has happened?

The answer can be found in the manipulative, murderous, and to some extent racist, organization known as the NRA, that has time and time again defended military-grade firearms, weapons specifically made for killing, to go about free in public affairs.

This past Friday, on November 3, 2017, I attended a lecture from well-known activist and journalist Shaun King at the University of Chicago, who laid out four major points as to how to win the struggles we face. He cited the NRA as a testament to the effectiveness of these points, as they follow the exact same method in order to manipulate millions of people for supporting their heinous cause. The four points are organization, energization, meticulous yet rational planning, and money.

The NRA indeed has all four of those points. They have the people, supposedly over 5 million members, that fuels their tremendous amount of money, and the energization and plan that is built off of the hysteria that President Obama was going to take away their guns and the over-interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment. And that’s exactly how the NRA continues to win over and manipulate gun-owners: they build off of tragedies like what happened in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs in such a way to manifest in their members the mentality that the government is supposedly out to nullify the 2^nd Amendment; it creates a wave of apathy towards mass shootings.

The way the NRA continues to thrive in the politicians they buy out is clever yet damning. Time and time again we’ve seen this organization indoctrinate their members to stay oblivious to the issue of gun control and instead convey their “thoughts and prayers”.

Prayers are great, but at the same time, we need to realize that 25 people lost their lives praying inside a church.

It’s sickening that even in a church, which is a meant to be a place for solace and meditation, cannot even be enough to shake the NRA, or any right-winger for that matter, to realize that gun violence is a cancer that inflicts this country far too much. Every night I wonder how do these people sleep at night knowing that they have the authority to address the abuse of their beloved guns, and they knowingly choose to not do anything about it.

It didn’t take an elementary school, a movie theater, a Black church, a Sikh temple, a nightclub, a country music festival, or now even a church to end the polarization of the issue of gun control. Thoughts and prayers have not done anything to solve this, nor will they ever. It’s time to act upon gun control. It’s time to outlaw military-grade weapons that will never end up being necessary in the first-world, everyday life we live in. It’s about expanding background checks to people who want to buy a firearm or apply for a FOID. It’s about protecting the children from ending up like the children who ended up perishing in the Sandy Hook massacre.

Here at DePaul University, we often ask a question paramount to Vincentian values and that is, “What must be done?” It is times like these where we examine how these cancers come about in our society to create a sounder and just society, and it starts by ending the polarization of such a costly issue like that of gun control, where human lives are unknowingly at stake.