Last February, 19 students and two teachers were killed in a Texas elementary school shooting. 42 mothers and fathers grieved the deaths of their sons and daughters, and hundreds of friends gathered in memory of these 10-year-olds. Just half a year later, it was revealed that the weapon of assault was obtained legally without a permit or background check.

We cannot continue to sit in silence while bullets break apart our nation. It is our responsibility to take legislative action before more lives are cut short.

First, let’s clarify why it is so important to mandate background checks and limit the types of guns people can buy: There were over 488 mass shootings in the US in 2024 alone, taking over 18,600 lives according to the CDC.

And it’s easy to see why; in America, it is TOO EASY to get a gun. Advocacy groups like the NRA call it freedom, but I call it danger.

But how can you even get a gun in the first place? What does our current system look like?

CNN in June 2015 explained that to purchase a gun from a licensed dealer, you can literally walk into a store, choose a gun and show your ID. The only regulation they have right now is that the store will run your ID against an FBI database to check whether or not you’ve done jail time or have been deemed mentally defective by a court.

Okay, that doesn’t sound bad until you realize that the FBI’s database is just ineffective. The FBI themselves in their 2022 NICS report admitted that over 90% of the checks are done immediately without any verification – their stats are not double-checked or verified/updated frequently.

That’s why of the 112,000 gun purchases in 2017, only 12 people were actually rejected and prosecuted.

And what about illegal, unlicensed dealers? Every year, 1.2 million unlicensed dealers sell guns without background checks.

And we wonder why an American is shot every 11 minutes. We wonder why our kids are scared to go to school when we had over 83 school shootings JUST last year. It’s time we take accountability.

States should mandate that any gun owner passes an actually-effective background check and also limit the types of guns people can buy – so people are no longer walking the streets with grenade launchers and AR 15s, but with small pistols that can only be used to defend themselves. This isn’t just a blanket ban.

Is there proof that this works? Absolutely.

19 states already mandate detailed background checks, and according to a 2019 Boston study, states with these checks had 15% lower homicide rates and almost 60% fewer mass shootings. And each government has the bandwidth to handle this.

This means no more walking in and buying guns, and no more lives cut short – it is our solution to make America safe again.

One rifle. 250 rounds of bullets. 500 seconds – that’s all it took for Salvador Ramos to kill 19 students. Tess Mata, Navaeh Bravo and Jose Flores would have graduated elementary school that year if Salvador had not picked up a gun and brutally murdered them.

Behind each bullet statistic lies a story of a life cut short. Remember their names; don’t add any more to that list.