It’s been almost nineteen years since the shooting at Columbine, almost eleven years since the shooting at Virginia Tech, almost six years since the shooting at Sandy Hook, almost two years since the shooting at an Orlando nightclub, almost a year since the shooting in Las Vegas, almost two months since the shooting at Stoneman Douglas and almost two weeks since the shooting in Maryland.

And almost every time, we have almost made people safe by just talking about instilling gun control within this country.

These mass shootings that have killed/threatened large groups of people and forced America to consider the exact meaning of the second amendment. Presidents have wrestled with this issue for years and many protests have happened but we are still nowhere closer to a form of gun control.

Politics and what makes a re-election campaign sell to voters is what that politician is capable of doing to appease their voters. One thing that has endangered the ability to really get any form of gun control passed is the NRA (National Rifle Association).

Student Emma Gonzalez’s acclaimed speech was something to admire because it has created a real movement for people to back gun control and influence the conversation on it. However, that seems to be the real problem, we are still only having conversations about this and no real action is being taken.

New advances in gun technology have been made but people are still hesitant about pulling the trigger. In 2015, 60 Minutes produced a story about how some guns are being made so that only one person can use them. Similar to the use of a thumbprint to unlock your iPhone, these guns can only be used by the person they are registered to.

This then creates a problem for whether or not someone uses these guns to commit a mass shooting or if someone should use this gun for protection and they kill someone innocent. Guns, as a whole, create a Catch-22 effect on society, because despite wanting to change the way we go about having them in our lives, there is a continual feedback loop to something negative.

One example of this is the issue of taking away certain guns. Many people have been up in arms because they view it as an infringement of their Second Amendment rights, when in fact this is not the case. People want to make it difficult for people to buy machine guns and other guns that people wouldn’t necessarily need for “protection”.

That’s a primary reason that people feel they should need machine guns and other weapons similar to it. Also, the ways people want to interpret the second amendment as a means of wasting even more time so people don’t have to give up their guns. The Obama administration faced a great deal of criticism about this, an issue characterized in the hit HBO series, The Newsroom.

In the season one episode, I Will Try to Fix You, a story on guns details how newsmakers like Sarah Palin, Wayne LaPierre, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are saying that Obama was going to make it so people couldn’t own guns. In fact this wasn’t true nor is much of what is said about “taking away guns”.

People think owning a machine gun for protection is necessary, but this only has some logic if you are Don Vito Corleone and you just found out Sonny was just killed leaving Long Beach. Other than that, there is no reason a person should have an Uzi for protection.

Some feel that they should have guns of that caliber in case they need to overthrow the government. Be real about this, no one is really going to overthrow the government, mainly because they can out gun the rest of the people in the country. And to be serious about it, who really wants to overthrow the government?

Overthrowing the government is something that was thought of based on just how the times were when the Constitution was drafted. People were unsure whether or not another country was going to threaten their freedoms.

Another school shooting occurred in only two weeks ago in Maryland, with the shooter dying hours after killing two students. This was just over a month after the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Since then the gun control laws in Florida have changed.

Large-scale protests such as the March for Our Lives were met with counter protests, aptly called the March for Our Guns. Counter protesters were trying to maintain the illusion that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This may be true in some cases but guns are still weapons that bring harm to large amounts of people everyday.

It all comes back to the idea that guns should be considered a normal part of life, and with the violence culture in this country, they have. The normalization of guns in this country is what makes people feel they are entitled to just have the large scale guns that roam the streets making people feel “safe”.

Safety isn’t really the issue, but more or less a sense of entitlement surround ding guns. People feel that they should be allowed to have whatever type of gun they want but that simply isn’t what should be going on.

The country won’t ever resolve the issue of guns and while this may sound pessimistic it’s actually realistic. Guns are an issue that haven’t changed because of these mass shootings. It seems that people still have to get hurt in order to prove a point.