When I heard about the El Paso shooting, I was at a concert in Cleveland. I opened Twitter while waiting for the artist to come on and blinked when I saw the headline on the trending page, accompanied by the flashing red-and-blue footage of police cars on the scene. I was angry and sad, but I wasn't surprised. And when I woke up the next morning to the news of the Dayton shooting, I was angrier and sadder but still not surprised.

What I also was, what I guess I always sort of am, was scared. The concert was great, but every bout of excited screaming or foot-stomping had me turning around to check, just in case. I couldn't help but start to think of how I would get out of here if anything were to happen: I was in the front of a pit, surrounded by people. How would I get around them? What if I lost the friend I was with? The venue was on a pier - what should I do, jump into the Cuyahoga River?

Yesterday, in New York City, a backfiring motorcycle sent Times Square into a panic, eliciting a stampede that injured multiple people. Our nation is terrified, traumatized. There is an ever-present awareness that, simply by virtue of daring to be alive and out in public, we are at risk of being gunned down.

This isn't a particularly new phenomenon, nor was it isolated to this weekend's violence. The massacres we've seen in the last few days have heightened this anxiety, but it's been there for years. For people my age, we've never known anything different. I'll never forget the day in my junior year of high school when the principal came over the loudspeaker to let everyone know that a traffic light in the center of town had gone out in a snowstorm. He had started the announcement, innocently enough, with the phrase "the police have informed me" and followed it with a millisecond of a pause. In that brief moment of silence, I watched two dozen high schoolers scan the room, wide-eyed. I knew we were all thinking the same thing. When the announcement ended, there was an audible exhale. Someone said, "wow, I was ready to jump out that window." When I got in the car with my sister at the end of the day, she said, "I really thought we were going to die for a second there."

The cliche of teenagers and young people possessing an 'invincibility complex' is outdated. We have never had the luxury of being assured of our own longevity. We have never known a time in which we were not aware that, wherever we are, be it school, a concert, a place of worship, a garlic festival, or even Walmart, we are in danger.

Many of these attacks, in particular the El Paso shooting, are acts of terror. They are designed to promote an agenda through fear, and on this front, they are remarkably, disturbingly effective. Not only are the El Paso shooter's virulently racist views now being given the airtime he so desired, but people - especially the Latino community that was so horrifically targeted - are terrified of the threat that the most mundane of tasks - grocery shopping, of all things - poses. We are living in times of near-dystopia level paranoia and fear, while a screamingly obvious solution stares us in the face. Every mass shooting is followed by the same tired, angry circles on gun control. The helplessness the American people feel in the wake of these cyclical tragedies is only extrapolated by the unwillingness of our politicians to take the steps needed to prevent these things from happening. Victims of terrorism are not reassured by their leaders shrugging their shoulders and waiting for the next act of terror.

This time, we are at least seeing some minimal willingness by Senate Republicans to advance red-flag law legislation that would take guns out of the hands of some dangerous people. It's not enough, but at least it's something. The stakes here, however, are higher than can fully be expressed. The gun control debate is not simply a debate between red-flag laws and universal background checks, between NRA influence and the will of the American people. It's a battle between omnipresent fear and the reclamation of our own lives.