Last night, at an outdoor country concert on the Las Vegas strip, 64-year old, Nevada resident Stephen Paddock opened fire on concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival. At the time of my writing this, 59 people have been confirmed dead, and at least 527 others were injured. You read that correctly. It is the deadliest mass shooting to occur in the modern United States since the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, where 49 people were killed 53 injured. The United States suffered more casualties last night, in this singular event, than we have casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2016 and 2017 combined (Credit: Paul Brandus, @WestWingReport). According to law enforcement and accounts from survivors, it took around 7-10 minutes of gunfire for Stephen Paddock to inflict that much harm.

Today, my anthropology class, as many classes at Denison tend to do when something happens in our country that feels too big to ignore, hit the pause button on our curriculum to talk about this. Debate ensued, as is expected. My argument, which I think I presented quite eloquently given the fact that I had a gold temporary tattoo still stuck on my face from a sorority philanthropy event the night before, was met with a counter we’ve all heard before: People who wish to carry out violence against others will do so no matter what restrictions you put on guns. There are already too many guns in private hands. Guns are sold illegally all the time. Mass shootings are inevitable. They will happen, and there is nothing we can do about it except maybe press our legislators to improve mental healthcare in this country so that these apparent monsters living under our bed bearing assault rifles can be handled after all. Let’s unpack this.

Let’s decide for the purpose of this article that a mass-shooting free America is a pipe dream. Let’s decide for the time being of you reading this (if anyone is reading this at all) that America is destined for the occasional random slaughter of men, women, and children committed with weapons of war in a movie theater or food court regardless of policies we put in place. But, even with this presumption, let’s also consider that in this country we’ve created a legal way to purchase of assault rifles and magazines. In trying to imagine what America would look like if we fully banned the kinds of assault weapons used in shootings like the one last night, recognize the fact that 82% of mass shootings done in the past three decades have been carried out using weapons that were legally purchased. These instances include, but are not limited to:

Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 and injuring 53. Targets were predominantly LGBTQ-identifying, people of color, or both.

San Bernadino, killing 14, injuring 21.

Umpqua Community college, 9 deaths.

Lafayette, Louisiana at a movie theater. 2 killed, 9 injuries.

Charleston, South Carolina. A church. 9 deaths.

A high School in Marysville, Washington. 4 killed.

Fort Hood, Texas. Carried out by a United States veteran. 3 killed. 14 wounded.

Newtown, CT. Sandy Hook Elementary school. 27 killed, mostly children.

Oak Creek, WI. A Sikh Temple terrorized, 6 were killed.

Aurora, CO. 12 killed, 70 wounded in a movie theater.

Oikos University in Oakland, California. 7 killed.

Tucson, AZ at an event for Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords. 6 killed.

Read that. Consider that every assailant person on that list, many of whom who had criminal history and/or ample evidence of serious mental health issues, was legally able to obtain weaponry capable of committing that much carnage in a singular event. (Note: To be totally fair, in the case of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, the weapons belonged to his mother. However, they were easily accessible to him in their shared home.)

Now I want you to think about something else. When the AIDS crisis began taking the impoverished communities of Sub-Saharan Africa by storm, did anyone, or has anyone, or will anyone, ever consider the fact that treating every single HIV-infected individual on the continent of Africa is an insurmountable goal, ruminate on that idea, and decide that the natural path to take because of this was to throw up our hands and let millions of people die simply because we couldn’t save everyone? AIDS is inevitable, people will die, so we should really accept it as facet of life and let people die even when that death is entirely unnecessary? Are you able to clock how insane that sounds?

If you argued that gun control legislation and the criminalization of weapons capable of mass slaughter, or at the bare minimum a more stringent process for people obtaining them, would have failed to stop at least one of those events I listed on the first page of this, or one of the 270 mass shootings the United States has seen in 2017 so far. I would have a very difficult time believing you. And for me, preventing even one of those events, or any event that absolutely will come after it, is worthy of all the time and deliberation to create the legislation required. This is what it boils down to: it is not nuanced, it is not complicated. You either value these weapons over human life, or you value human life over weapons. Pick a side. I am trying to make this article eloquent, and well thought-out, but at the end of the day, I am so sick and tired of us calling this issue “complicated”. If one more person refers to 20 kindergarteners being murdered in cold blood in their classroom as “nuanced” I am going to lose my mind.

Is mental health in America an issue that plays into this, and does America need to take better care of its mentally ill? Absolutely. Is everyone who has ever carried out a mass shooting mentally ill? No. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. It’s considerably more comfortable to reconcile these acts of violence as ones carried out by people living on the fringes of society, people we would never interact with. The “boogeyman” option, just as it exists in the discourse surrounding sexual assault, will always be easier to live with and by extension will influence popular wisdom. Mental illness actually makes up a very small percentage (3-5% according to Columbia University and Duke) of violent crimes committed. This is not about mental health. This is about the types of guns we allow in America, how many guns we have (roughly one gun per every American citizen, according to a UNODC Small Arms survey conducted in 2007) and how readily we allow anyone who wants one to have it.

What I’m trying to say is that yes, gun rights advocates are probably right about the fact that gun violence, and senseless violence in general are things we will never escape. There are other things in this world that can hurt us, and I realize that. But there is no other form of violence, done with legally obtainable agents, that can hurt us as efficiently and devastatingly as massacre via assault rifle. There certainly is not one more preventable. So even if we can’t get rid of all gun violence, the least we can do is make it much more difficult to commit. As my title suggests, I am heartbroken. I didn’t want to write this tonight (well, I did, since this is technically Katie Landoll’s editing spot. Thanks Katie.) I wanted to write something funny about how absurd the chaos of this weekend’s Greek philanthropy events were . Laughing about almost anything felt kind of gross today, because people died for no reason last night, and will continue to do so until there is aggressive legislative change. So, pray and keep the victims and their families in your thoughts if that’s something that helps you. Go to sleep tonight feeling infinitely grateful that it wasn’t you, or your family. But this will not help them, and it will not keep any of us safe. Go to https://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ to find your member of the House of Representatives.Tell them you are scared. Ask them why people had to die last night. Ask them how many more will die before they do something. Beg them. Plead them. Write them. This fight will not feel like it’s yours until it is.