Never forget! We stand cry this out in solidarity with the kids’ and teachers’ lives that were affected by violence, who saw their classmates hurt or worse, who ran for their lives, holding their breath as they texted their parents a final goodbye. Never forget! We make posters and wear t-shirts to support what victims will never forget, and use it as a rallying cry for justice and for action. In protests, in walkouts, in rallies we raise our voices and our fists and say, “We will never forget!” And then…we do.  As time goes on, we our minds drift to the next cause, until another tragedy wakes us up from this numb state in which we are living. Things must change. It can’t take another massacre to outrage this country into change, to propel the motivation to fight in us; we must continue to push for change to live up to the age-old mantras of never again/enough/forget. 

It’s easy to become complacent when lockdown drills in schools have become as commonplace as a study hall. But it shouldn’t be easy. We say ‘never forget,’ but it happens almost every day. According to CNN’s definition of a school shooting, 46 weeks into 2019, there were 45 school shootings. That’s nearly an average of one school shooting a week. Of those, 32 of them were at facilities serving kindergarten through 12th grade. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been at least 26 incidents of gunfire on school grounds so far in 2020, resulting in 9 deaths and 12 injuries. Washington Post reporter Robert Klemko wrote “Last month was the first March without a school shooting since 2002.” Ironically, it seems to take a world-wide pandemic to keep students safe from gun violence. We must keep ourselves healthy from the virus of forgetfulness, and see that this issue doesn’t fade away until the next incident hits the headlines. We say enough and we mean it. None of us want to imagine the possibilities, but they aren’t possibilities, they are realities. 

Is forgetting is our way of healing, of going on with our lives?  If so, this is a privilege we only have because gun violence has yet to happen to us or to our community. According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, in 2019, the U.S. had more mass shootings than days of the year with a whopping 417. GVA defines a mass shooting as any incident in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, half of all Americans live in states where a convicted felon, domestic abuser, or fugitive can skip a background check by finding an unlicensed seller at a gun show or online. However, in states using background checks, more than 3.5 million illegal gun sales have been blocked in the past 20 years. In an article from Time, Michael Siegel, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health, said background checks are most effective when coupled with two other policies — gun permit requirements and restrictions on gun ownership for people with a history of violence. According to a study Siegel published in 2019 with other researchers, violent misdemeanor laws reduced homicides by 18.1 percent, and universal background checks reduced homicides by 14.9 percent. Lawmakers must close loopholes to keep guns out of the hands of people using them for the wrong reasons. That’s not to say Americans can’t have the freedom to own guns, but they should have to go through a process just like you would to get your license. Background checks, a written test, training, and a real on-the-scene test should determine if you can take home and use this item that has the power to hurt you and the people around you, just like driving a car.

There’s no question that these statistics are horrific, the debate comes in on the basis of change. But when you put us all together, I can’t tell if Americans are more afraid of change or staying the same.