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School shootings are horrific, and not just for those inside the school. The horrors that take place in a situation like that are indescribable. I wouldn’t even try to imagine them, much less write about them.

However, there seems to be an impression that mass shootings only happen in schools.

No, really.

Titled, “If all adults faced what children have to face, US gun laws would change immediately,” the column advances the arguments from the March For Life crowd. However, it fundamentally ignores countless mass shootings that take place outside of schools.

For one, the recent shooting in Aurora, Illinois where a convicted felon passed two background checks to get a gun, then later carried that gun to a former place of employment to kill as many people as possible.

It ignores a shooting in another city named Aurora, this one in Colorado, where a deranged madman opened fire in a crowded movie theater, killing a dozen people.

It ignores Las Vegas, where a maniac killed 59 people.

It ignores Sutherland Springs where the killer ended 26 lives, not counting his worthless existence.

And, on a more personal level, it ignores the Cafe Racer shooting in Seattle, Washington where five people were killed, including one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever been blessed to know.

Pretending that adults don’t deal with this isn’t clever. It’s idiotic and flies in the face of reality.

Then why don’t gun laws change? Probably because the problem has nothing to do with gun laws. The problem is deeper than that. It’s about the individuals wielding the guns in the first place. Even if you took away every gun from every person, including criminals, maniacs are still going to try and slaughter people wholesale.

In Toronto, Canada, a man killed ten people and injured 15 others with a van. He wasn’t the first to use a van as a weapon, either. In 2016, a van attack in Nice, France killed a mindboggling 87 people. For those keeping score at home, that’s more than the Las Vegas shooting. And yet you can still buy or rent vans without a background check. There’s no waiting period for vans either. Technically, you can buy a van without a license, though one is required to operate it on public roads.

Those attacks didn’t impact just one age group, either.

Claiming that if adults had to deal with mass shootings, the laws would change displays a profound ignorance in even recent history. We’re a year and a half separated from Las Vegas, for example, yet it seems that shooting is already forgotten by people like the writer.

Adults deal with shootings all the time, unfortunately. If we’re not the target, then our children are.

However, many of us understand that gun control won’t stop violence, as noted above. We know that violent people will continue to be violent and may well become even more dangerous without guns, believe it or not.

The fact that we’re adults, however, is why we can recognize that a band-aid solution is misguided at best, evil at worst.

It’s only too bad that a handful of adults are willing to look outside of gun laws for solutions.