Last week Orlando, Florida, experienced two horrible tragedies within 48 hours. To put it simply, the reason behind both tragedies was the second amendment: two american citizens demonstrating their right to bear arms, one killing an innocent 22 year old, the other killing 49 innocent people--deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States. Even after seeing the loved ones of the victims weep over the loss of their lives and watching people from all over the world come together to morn the attack on the LGBTQ community, the Republican party still can’t understand why a change in gun laws needs to be made. No other country in the world comes close to meeting our statistics when it comes to gun homicides per day or mass shootings per year, so why is America the only country who refuses to see we have a major problem?

The argument “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is not a valid argument. Guns were made for the sole purpose of killing. They are used by the military to kill the enemy, by police officers to kill the criminal, by hunters to kill the animal. You aren’t going to buy an AR15 and hang it up on your wall because it looks pretty, and you’re not going to go hunting with it, so what else are you going to do with it? That is a military rifle, used during a war, to do only one thing. To kill. Yes, technically people kill people--someone needs to pull the trigger--but if there wasn’t a trigger to pull, there wouldn’t have been 49 killed and 53 injured. As much as I’d love to put restrictions on people, we can’t, so we need to do our best to put our restrictions on the weapons they’re using.

I’m not naive, I realize that no amount of gun control can stop the most determined person from getting a gun. However, I don’t understand why we wouldn’t try to limit the amount of guns being put in the wrong hands. There are strict laws regarding drugs--people still manage to get them--but there are still laws. The mentality “it won’t work so why bother” is completely insane. Why wouldn’t we want to prevent mass shootings and gun homicide? It works for every other country in the world, so I’m fairly certain it’ll work for us. We aren’t looking to take away the second amendment, but reforms do need to be made. There is no reason you should have an AK47 in your home. You do not need military assault riffles as an average civilian.

There needs to be some kind of background check when purchasing a gun. I can’t even to begin to understand why there’s even an argument about this. Why WOULDN’T you want to make sure the clinically insane man down the street couldn’t get his hands on a gun and shoot up your neighborhood grocery store? If you’re of sane mind and really truly can’t survive without your guns, you’ll get your guns, so you have nothing to worry about. It shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than it is to get a passport.

Making sure you’ve got your gun strapped to your ankle before going out to the club also isn’t the solution to the problem. If anything, that will increase the amount of deaths in situations like that. Can you imagine every single person in the club that night grabbing their guns from their back pockets going nuts and firing at anything that moved thinking it was the gunman? Meanwhile the people running for their lives are getting shot by the people trying to kill the gunman. He had an AR15; shotguns aren’t going to stand a chance. Adding fuel to the fire isn’t going to make the fire any smaller or less deadly.

I understand that it is an amendment. It is in the Constitution. But the Constitution was written in a time where it was perfectly acceptable to meet someone on the street and shoot each other with the purpose of seeing who the better man was. We are constantly adjusting things with time, so why is this any different? We tried prohibition, it didn’t work, so adjustments were made. The right to bear arms no longer works in this world. We have become a world of hatred, and yes, while I do believe love has the power to overcome it, we need to do something until then. Every other country in the world has. We can’t continue turning on the news to hear of another mass shooting and brush it off like a used car dealership commercial. Innocent lives cannot continue to be taken because of your second amendment right; that is not why the founding fathers wrote it. Stop using it as an excuse for change and start accepting the fact that people are dying because of it.