Several school shootings have, unfortunately, been broadcasted over the past year. Many people think that the guns are to blame, begging for stricter gun control laws, but it’s not just the guns, it’s the people too. The most recent shooting took place in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018, where former Stoneman Douglas High School student Nikolas Cruz wounded 14 and killed 17 teachers and students. Many people have mixed comments and concerns, one side says that gun control laws should be made stricter, while the other side believes that mental illness is the main cause of mass shootings.

You see, guns don’t shoot by themselves. The people who decide to shoot up schools are responsible, meaning bills concerning guns will do nothing to help.

Many people, especially in the mainstream media, will do what they usually do after a tragic event like this: call for gun control laws. However, those would not have stopped 19 year-old Nikolas Cruz from causing Parkland’s latest tragedy, as he had no past criminal record or mental illness. It was from his own motives that he shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This shows that it’s not the guns that cause violence, it’s the people. 20 school shootings have happened in the past 20 years that include a student dying, according to The Daily Mail. However, all of these students had a motive to the shootings. For example, the despicable men behind the 1999 Columbine shooting wanted to pull off an attack rival to the Oklahoma City bombing. The statistic of 18 school shootings in 2018 alone will be used to convince people to ask for stricter gun control. However, this is actually the low, but still terrible, number of 3, according to research conducted by the Ben Shapiro show. Just because you own a gun, it does not make you inherently evil.

Even though people have problems it is definitely not okay to cause harm to others. There is a number of reasons that people have shot up schools. A big one is mental illness, the kid who shot up the school in Florida, his mother and his father died, but that is not an excuse to shoot up a school. There is more than just mental illness though, there is a lot of reasons that someone would try to harm others by shooting up a school.

Some solutions are arming the schools and improving school security. Those two things would help because if there was an active shooter the security could stop the situation faster than police, because they’re already there. That would cause less people to possibly get injured and also save a lot of lives.

Now as civilians, what should we do to help prevent school shootings? We should do many things, including teaching proper gun safety to gun owners and keeping guns away from the mentally ill. Background checks and a database of potential threats if armed with a weapon should be created and used for those trying to buy a gun, whether it be from a licensed seller to a seller at a gun show. These precautions should be effective in preventing shootings of any kind. Also, we should teach children to be smart and safe with dangerous objects; it could cost someone their life.