Editorial: More mass shootings, more silence

Stop us if you have heard the following before:

Four people were killed and six were injured in a shooting in Fresno, California Sunday evening and three are dead after a shooting at a Walmart in Oklahoma.

There was once a time where that news would have jostled people, or at the very least sparked some kind of anger.

But now we are numb to it.

We are numb to people senselessly losing their lives because of gun violence. We are numb to the names, numb to the locations, numb to all the details that should shake us at our cores.

But this is now reality in the United States Shootings happen, we read about them in the news and then spend our time watching our politicians do nothing to solve the problem, just buying time until the next shooting.

If those first five paragraphs sounded familiar, they should have. They are the same five paragraphs we wrote in October after four people were killed at a bar in Kansas City, all we did was change the locations and number of dead.

That is because this is what we do in America now. We change the location of the shooting, we change the number of the dead and then go on with our lives. No changes occur, our lawmakers quibble over guns, exchanging tired back and forth arguments, while the rest of us sit and wait for the next mass shooting to hit the headlines, only so we can start the process all over again.

But these weekend shootings are isolated, it was only just Friday that a 16-year-old high student shot and killed two of his classmates at school. The seventh school shooting of the year, according to The Washington Post.

And of course, these all come on the heels of a house party shooting in California that left five people dead in late October.

All of those shootings get quickly forgotten, because they all get followed up by another one that takes its place in the headlines, until the cycle repeats itself, again and again.

What are we to do?

Is this the reality we are expected to live in?

Sit by and watch shooting after shooting unfold?

It cannot be. Something has to happen. Our lawmakers need to step up and make changes so people stop senselessly losing their lives to angry people with guns.

This can no longer be a partisan issue.

People are dying. Losing their lives without reason, without answers, without action.

The solution to this problem has been staring us all in the face for awhile now.

We need serious gun reform in the United States and we need it now.