January 3rd. St. Johns, Michigan. A 31-year-old man died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a former school's parking lot.

January 10th. Sierra Vista, Arizona. A teen was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Coronado Elementary School bathroom.

January 20th. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A Winston-Salem State University football player was shot and killed at an event at Wake Forest University.

January 22nd. Italy, Texas. A teenage girl was wounded at Italy High School after a 16-year-old opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun.

January 22nd. Gentilly, Louisiana. A shooting outside the NET Charter High School injured a 14-year-old boy.

January 23rd. Benton, Kentucky. Two people were killed and another fifteen were shot at Marshall County High School.

January 31st. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gunshots were fired during a fight at Lincoln High School. A 32-year-old man was shot twice and pronounced dead.

February 1st. Los Angeles, California. An accidental shooting injured five children at the Salvador B. Castro Middle School in downtown L.A.

February 5th. Oxon Hill, Maryland. A teen was shot outside of Oxon Hill High School and survived.

February 14th. Broward County, Florida. A former student killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High.

These are all of the school shootings in 2018 that resulted in injury and/or death - the full list can be found here. The fact that this number of shootings goes into double digits, just a month and a half into 2018, is sickening.

I wasn't alive when the Columbine shooting happened, but I remember turning on the TV one day in 2014 and seeing news footage of the students of Sandy Hook Elementary School being led out of their school and reporters discussing who the shooter was. I called my mom, who was still at work (at the time, she was an elementary special education teacher), and I couldn't say anything. I was just sobbing into the phone. We didn't know what to do, how to react. Even now, over three years later, it still pains me (and many others) to think about the trauma that these children had to go through. That incident alone should have been enough for the leaders of our country to do something about our gun laws. The fact that it's happened so many times in the past couple of years tells a lot about the state of our country's laws.

America is desensitized to gun violence. The phrase "Oh, there was another shooting" is said in a jaded tone. We're used to innocent lives being ripped away from us for no reason. How many children have to die before our Congress fixes these laws on guns? In the 21st century, over 200 kids have died as a result of school shootings. So clearly, we're doing something wrong here.

Kentucky governor Matt Bevin states what he believes is the cause of these horrific murders - and apparently, it's not guns. "[Video games] celebrate the slaughtering of people. There are games that literally replicate and give people the ability to score points for doing the very same thing that these students are doing inside of schools, where you get extra points for finishing someone off who's lying there begging for their life." In his eyes, our "problem" is how violence is shown in the media. They take away our First Amendment to protect the Second.

Some believe that politics should be left out of tragedies like this. I'm not saying we should stick a camera in the faces of grieving children and ask them about gun control. However, it needs to be remembered that the United States has had so many shootings in the past decade. Meanwhile, Australia enacted many new gun laws after a 1996 massacre, such as banning semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and thorough background checks along with a presentation of a "justifiable reason" to own a gun. It isn't normal for so many innocent lives to be taken this much and this often. Now, more than ever, we need to stand up and fight for our safety. We owe it to our children and their teachers to keep them safe at school. Please, call your representatives. We shouldn't have to fight this hard for basic safety.

(Another great article on this topic can be found here.)