Florida Shooting

I find it shocking on how often I seem to find myself reading about horrible events like the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. I am sure most of you, if not all of you, have been seeing the coverage around the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, but here is some basic information. A nineteen year old male opened fire at the high school on Wednesday. He killed seventeen people with an AR-15, a semi-automatic weapon.

This morning in my cultural diversity class, our topic of discussion surrounded the shooting and gun control in the United States. I realize that there are a lot of controversies and issues surrounding this topic, and I am not going to take any specific side in this post. I simply wanted to share some of what we talked about in class.

My professor had only planned for the discussion to take about ten minutes or so, but, to her surprise, the discussion took thirty minutes and would have gone the whole class time if she had not had us move on to today's activity. The students had all kinds of different views on gun control. Some were completely for it and could not be swayed to see the other side of the discussion. Others were completely against it and did not see any benefit in guns being so available to people. Some were somewhere in between the two views. The discussion began to get pretty heated among the class, but at the end of it all the questions that remained were: when do tragedies like the Parkland shooting stop? and should weapons of a military level be available to people outside of the military? No one could provide the right answer.

The discussion left me thinking. I learned that since the start of 2018 there have been eighteen school shootings in the U.S. alone. It is truly tragic. Last night, the principal at the high school I attended and the one my siblings currently attend sent out an email to all of the families. He said that he sadly is not able to promise that something like the shooting in Florida will not happen at this high school or in the surrounding community. It is scary to think like this but that is the world we seem to live in. I don't know what needs to happen for this to stop being the case, but I know we can always hope for a safer future.