Mass shootings and gun violence are an epidemic in the United States like nowhere else. Gun homicides claim an average of 13,000 lives each year, and that doesn’t even count accidents or suicide, which would raise the number to a horrific 33,000 gun deaths in America every year. The rate of gun violence in America far surpasses other developed countries. And mass shootings have made their home in America; enough massacres are occurring to have nearly one for every day of the year. As one of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States should be a leader in education, economics, and world relations--not mass shootings.  How the U.S. stacks up While gun violence is an issue in other countries in the world as well as the United States, America still proves to be an anomaly among its developed and high-income country counterparts. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun homicide rate in America is 25 times the average of other high-income countries. So not o

It is Valentine’s Day. Students are seated in their afternoon classrooms in Parkland, Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They had evacuated the building into the warm sunshine for a fire drill earlier in the day, but everyone is back indoors now, some in the 3-story air-conditioned Building 12, typing on laptops and scribbling down homework. At 2:20 p.m., 16-year-old Aalayah Eastmond sits in her Holocaust History class in room 1214. There was higher security because of students smoking in the restrooms, but nothing felt unusual about the normal school day. Students, faculty, and staff continued on with their afternoon unaware that former student and 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz would begin murdering people with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle within 60 seconds. At 2:21 p.m., Eastmond and her classmates heard the first shots and immediately took cover in a corner of their classroom, in perfect view from the window in the classroom door. This is not how they practiced durin