“It’s a mall shooting,”one mall worker, identified only as K.T., told CNN. 

“No one knows what’s going on. In today’s world, you hear gunshots and you run.”

(From CNN.com)

In a scene replayed over and over again in recent American history, we are deluged with the images and stories of another mass shooting at a public American venue. In this, the latest case of violence directed at apparently no one in particular, the target was a mall in Columbia, Maryland.

It could have been any mall in the nation, at any time of the day.

Regardless of whether or not those killed in this recent tragedy were intended targets, it seems we are getting all-too-used to the story. It seems we are now numbed to the fact that real people are dying real deaths at the hands of people who have one thing in common—they all had access to firearms. It seems to me that we seem all-too-willing to sacrifice the lives of people for an idea that seemed to make sense in the 18th century.

It also seems that we have become so used to catering to the lowest ideas of man that we forget that we must strive to evolve beyond outdated ideals that don’t seem to be working. It boggles the imagination to consider that innocent men, women, and children can be killed en masse while every attempt to protect them is stopped by what I see as narrow, scared and cowardly people.

I know—you own a gun and you dare me to call you cowardly to your face. Well, all I can ask is for you to look at the reasons you own them.

After that, I need not say a thing.

It is not my intention to offer the inane numbers supporting the reasons for gun control as well as the figures of the insane amounts of money being dumped at the feet of our “representatives” to ensure it never happens. Rather, I wish to offer you just one number in this article: Two.

Two people killed at a mall in Columbia, Maryland by someone who had a gun.

Two people hugging outside that mall, absorbing the enormity of the trauma they will live with for some time.

Like a pebble dropped into a pond, those two will create ripples most of us will never see. Kids who have lost parents. Parents who have lost kids. Brothers who have lost sisters, sisters who have lost brothers. As well as world that has lost an interminable amount of possibility—all because of easy access to weapons that have no other purpose but to kill accessible to those who have the will to use them.

It leaves me to wonder if this is the world we live in—o,r if it is in the world we have created.

In the one we live in, we seem to suggest we have no real choice in the matter.

In the other, the one we have created, we are the responsible party—and if we are responsible for the dis-ease then we can be responsible for the cure.

It seems the real question is, “How many have to die before we decide to recreate the world?”

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Editor: Bryonie Wise