We killed at least 10 students in Roseburg, Oregon.
Our inaction and incompetence bought the gun and loaded the bullets that ripped flesh and bone in the nightmarish catastrophe Thursday morning.
The deaths won’t stop here, either. Prepare the body bags, caskets and funeral songs because the killing won’t stop. We will sit by and watch from our school desks, office chairs and couches at home and say, “What a terrible world we live in.”
And then one day, it won’t be a stranger’s death the news is reporting on. One day, it will be your son or daughter, your sister or brother, your mother or father. Someone with evil intentions or a mental illness twisting their perception of the world will walk into your loved one’s school and kill them.
And it will be our fault.
Schools are meant to be safe havens for our country’s future, yet they’ve been made the burial grounds for innocent men and women. And we sit and watch with dropped jaws.
We let our mental health institutions crumble in front of our eyes, funding dried up and attention waned. We ignored the people who needed us most, and the consequences lay buried within wooden caskets in the ground.
Instead of action, we allowed politicians to spin gun reform into a campaign slogan — the liberals are coming for your guns, protect the Second Amendment, Jade Helm was the prelude to a federal takeover.
No one wants your damn guns. We want our brothers and sisters back. I want the 13 lives from Columbine back. I want the 32 students and faculty from Virginia Tech back. I want the 20 children and 6 adults from Sandy Hook back. I want the two women from Lafayette back. I want the killing to end.
We can’t eradicate evil in the hearts of mankind. We can’t fix the mental health system in a day, but we can’t ignore how much we need it, with $1.8
billion in cumulative cuts to mental health budgets from 2009-2011.
What we can do is make it harder to obtain guns.
Require psychiatric evaluations for the purchases of firearms. The economic burden of the evaluation does not outweigh the cost of a human life.
I don’t believe in seizing guns from those who take care when they use them. What I do believe is making certain those with guns won’t walk into my 9-year-old brother’s elementary school and threaten his life.
Until we quit the petty politics and work toward realistic and meaningful reforms, the mass shootings are on us. They’re our fault. We are responsible. Our inaction is murder.
Justin DiCharia is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Slidell, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JDiCharia.