Another mass shooting. Another “thoughts and prayers” request. Another tragedy that resulted in no action from our lawmakers.

The most recent mass shooting in the U.S. occurred at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California. Thousand Oaks had a “long-held sense of safety” and was even named as the third safest city in America by Niche.

Both ideas were destroyed in a matter of minutes.

Mass shooting after mass shooting and death after death continue, but communities have yet to come together and find ways to end this common occurrence in our country– an occurrence that’s so common that so far this year, we have had 307 mass shootings. To put this in perspective, as of Nov. 14, we are 317 days into the year. That’s almost one mass shooting per day.

To put this even more in perspective of how common mass shootings are in the U.S., at least two men who endured the horrific mass shooting at the country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 endured another mass shooting a little over a year later in Thousand Oaks.

Only one of those two men survived.

Your thoughts and prayers, while nice, are not working. One thing that we haven’t tried is gun control, which has proven to work in other countries.

In 2018, Canada and Australia have had one mass shooting so far, each– one.

After devastating mass shootings in their past, these two countries fixed their lax laws for better gun control, which have almost stopped mass shootings altogether. Gun control is not designed to take all of your guns away, but to ensure, through background screenings and many other methods, that guns are not easily obtainable by the wrong people and that this stops happening. And so far, it’s worked.

I shouldn’t fear going to school. I shouldn’t fear going to the movies. I shouldn’t fear going to the mall, to concerts, to bars– but I do. I’m not able to live my life without fear of turning the corner and seeing someone armed with a gun. And children shouldn’t have to carry that fear either.

This is not the America I learned about when I was younger.

Lawmakers, it’s time to do something about this problem instead of providing your “thoughts and prayers;” it’s time to create comprehensive gun control to ensure to everyone that losing hundreds upon hundreds of lives every year is not worth standing by idly anymore. It’s time to fix it.