A prime example of this ignorance comes in a piece where a student is talking about her decision to lead an anti-gun march.

My dad always tells me that one of his first memories, right before immigrating to Texas from India, is hearing of the Luby’s massacre in Killeen. Moving from a country where the very idea of a mass shooting was unfathomable to one where news reporters discussed the deaths of 23 people as if it were normal was a sobering moment that shattered his idealized image of the American dream. Thirty years later, another Texas mass shooting haunts my own memories — the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Like father, like daughter right?

The lives of 19 innocent children and two school teachers were brutally stolen in my home state. Nineteen children lost their lives in a place that was meant to keep them safe and prepare them for the future.

Unlike my dad, however, hearing about mass shootings in the news doesn’t surprise me. It certainly terrifies me, but it’s something I’ve come to anticipate: scouting out escape routes in all my classrooms at school, feeling my heart beat a little faster anytime there’s a loud noise in class, wondering if I can even go to my dance studio safely, fearing for my immigrant dad’s life every time he has to make a late night trip to Walmart. It’s something that I — and countless young Texans like me — have unfortunately learned to live with.

As a 17-year-old girl, it shouldn’t be my job to fight for laws that would keep my own life safe. But am I expected to just sit here when our lawmakers do nothing in the wake of tragedy after tragedy, even going so far as to weaken the existing basic gun safety laws?

Now, I get that she’s 17 and all that, but it’s clear that her education up to this point has managed to fail her.

After all, what do Uvalde and Luby’s have in common besides being the site of a mass shooting? Well, guns weren’t allowed on either property, for one thing.

What the writer doesn’t understand–and her age may excuse her, but not the adults who have taught her this and who perpetuate it–is that gun control may well have contributed to both of these massacres. If not for the rules in place at the time, Luby’s wouldn’t have been nearly as deadly. We know that for a fact.

Dr. Suzanna Hupp has testified that she had a gun in the glove box of her vehicle. She didn’t bring it into the cafeteria because the law forbid her from doing so. She complied with the law and her reward was watching both of her parents die.

If she’d had that gun, she’d have been in a position to put the gunman down before he killed anywhere near what he did. We saw a scenario play out like that not too long ago.

Yet every time gun control fails to stop a shooting, we have people more than ready to step up and declare we need still more of what just failed. Then they’re shocked and appalled (because they can’t be shocked without being appalled, it should be remembered) that some of us aren’t ready to throw away our rights when we have no reason to believe it would even work.

Mass shootings happen in gun-free zones more often than anywhere else. If such areas worked as advertised, we wouldn’t need any more gun control. Yet we have numerous mass shootings in these areas, so we’re told that we need more and more of what failed.

Eventually, people like the author would see us disarmed, even if they’d swear to the Heavens they want no such thing.

They wouldn’t necessarily even be lying. Right now, they don’t.

What they want is the next thing, though, and there will always be a next thing. There will be a next thing until there’s nothing left.

That’s why we won’t back down.