Last week, seven people were shot and killed at Umpqua Community College in southern Oregon.

A shooting of this magnitude is a national tragedy, and the media will treat it as such — for maybe a week. After that, everyone will put it in the back of their minds alongside Aurora, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Charleston, Chattanooga, Fort Hood, D.C., etc. The United States of America is the only developed country in the world where this is the norm. To everyone that says this issue shouldn’t be politicized, you could not be more wrong. How are we supposed to expect change in policy without grassroots movements that follow tragedies like this one?

In the wake of tragedies like this, it is normal for people to become upset, but for most, that’s also where the reactions end. We watch TV, we get mad, we forget about it, rinse and repeat. When is everyone going to be fed up with seeing a mass shooting on TV multiple times a week, and sometimes, multiple times a day? The Washington Post tells us we’ve had 294 mass shootings (four or more people killed by gunfire), and there have only been 274 days in 2015 so far. That is the most insane thing I’ve ever read.

Honestly, I’m losing hope fast that things will change for the better. The National Rifle Association is to blame for stopping any sensible gun legislation before it even makes it to the floor of either chamber of Congress. The NRA has become such a powerful and influential organization that it is stifling democracy. The fact is Americans want more gun control. A majority of Americans support bans on assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, and 83 percent of Americans support background checks on all gun purchases.

You should be able to own a reasonable gun in your home to protect yourself. You should also be able to own hunting weapons. What nobody should be allowed to own are weapons that are capable of dealing large amounts of deadly force in a short amount of time. Mandatory background checks coupled with a ban on assault weapons wouldn’t solve the problem entirely, but it would certainly help.

To give my conservative friends some credit, the root source of these massacres seems to be mental health. The vast majority of these shooters were in need of medical attention prior to an incident. What I don’t understand is how you can believe this, yet deny that universal health care would address it. A universal health care system would allow for anyone with mental health problems to be able to access necessary health care regardless of their wealth. While the free market certainly does some things better than the government, health care is not one of those things. Especially health care for those that can’t afford it. This is an obvious place for the government to step in and help those that need it.

All these measures are pretty lofty for your average citizen. National policy would have to change to enact any of these recommendations. And who knows? Maybe I’m wrong that more gun control would help. Maybe putting a gun in the hands of every American citizen would solve the problem. I’m not inclined to think so, but we should have the debate regardless. Whichever side you’re on, you should at least see that something needs to change. The situation has become too dire for us to just do nothing.

So what can we do here at UT to help the situation, short of contacting members of Congress? The answer is pretty simple: look out for each other. A lot of us already do this, and the strong sense of community is one of the things I love about UT. I hope we won’t let issues like this divide us, and we can continue to be kind to our fellow Volunteers. If you think that someone needs help, talk to them or figure out if you can do anything to help. If we choose to think of others instead of just ourselves, we can start to work toward the world that we want to see. I think we’d also realize that we have a lot more in common than we realize.

Thomas Carpenter is a senior in Classics. He can be reached at [email protected].