There are 365 days in a year. 

Shockingly, in 2018’s 365 days, 312 of those days included a mass shooting.

Gun violence has become an extremely controversial topic within the past few years. The government, gun agencies, and society have desperately tried to reach a consensus on if guns laws and regulations should become severely stricter, but like most controversial topics, there are too many opinions.  

85% of the days in 2018 included a mass shooting—commonly defined as four or more people are killed, not including the shooter, at the same general location and time—this means that during 312 days out of 2018, at least four people died.

The worst part of these mass shootings is that no one truly understands how pressing this issue is becoming. There are no solutions; mass shootings aren’t something you can necessarily prevent. The victims of these gut-wrenching events are usually innocent and irrelevant, so there is no way of predicting who’s next.

These shooters don’t plan on killing certain people; most shooters are mentally unstable and unhappy, so is the problem the gun or the people?

The most shocking thing about the topic overall is that people too quickly brush off the growing dilemma; too many people don’t understand reality.  

As a sophomore in high school living in a sheltered world, mass shootings never used to catch my attention until this year when I became frequently scared for my own life. Knowing that so many people died due to a mass shooting made me ponder too many scary and practical scenarios.

Who’s to say there won’t be a mass shooting at my school tomorrow? Who’s to say that I won’t get shot at my volleyball tournament? Who’s to say my parents will come home tonight?

Although these chilling scenarios could have happened at any point in time, I became more frightened. As shootings become closer to where we live, the probability of these events become more and more of a shocking reality.

1,152 people died last year due to mass shootings. Children, parents, grandparents, and siblings are being shot because someone was bullied in high school, because someone was having a rough day, because someone was sad.

The faint idea a mass shooting could occur in your city seems like a reality light years away, but that’s the issue. People are denying the facts. The numbers that make your stomach drop like an apple from a tree are not made up but are growing every year.

The newspapers littered with the words “mass shooting” no longer cause people to question society, but has become a constant normal; that should be alarming. This idea that mass shootings are normal has poisoned our society into thinking it’s another part of the daily news.

The problem no one seems to be able to solve won’t disappear on its own. But if we ignore the facts, nothing will change. The changes need to happen. The facts need to change. The numbers need to go down.

1,152 people died last year due to a mass shooting.

1,152 innocent people dead.