I would like to start this piece with a disclaimer: don’t waste your time reading this article. Why? Because it’s pointless. Gun control legislation isn’t going to change because an undergraduate student wrote an article buried in the opinion section of The Villanovan. 

This article will not change the trajectory of the next bullet fired to murder an innocent life. I waste ink, paper and your time by doing this. And yet I feel that I have no choice but to write this. 

I feel that I have to write this because of the raw fear I felt when I heard that there was a shooter terrorizing the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. 

I have to write this because, in that moment, I feared that tomorrow I would listen to a news anchor dispassionately recite the name of one of my closest friends, a UNC student, on the morning news, or see his name on a Congressperson’s tweet amongst a legion of others. 

Instead, thankfully, he responded to my text reassuring me that he was fine. There is nothing new I can say that has not already been said. What happens when there is simply no combination of words in the English lexicon that has not already been said, screamed or tweeted? 

We have prayed every prayer, pled every plea, argued every argument. The might of the pen has been proven inconsequential, its ink has run dry, and so we write in blood. 

Our writing pools around the bodies of dead children in halls, worshippers on sacred grounds and innocents flanked by the aisles of groceries. 

This sanguine ink never seems to run dry, for there is never a shortage of innocents to sacrifice on the altar of a severely misinterpreted 2nd Amendment. 

Look no further than Villanova’s own student body to see the impact and fear that these events cause.

“The fact that this is happening to college students – the future of our country is absolutely terrible,” sophomore Aleko Zeppos said. “Something has to be done.” 

And of course, he is right. That is our reaction every single time there is a shooting. Outrage. Calls for action. And eventually the old wounds are forgotten as new ones blister across our nation, as they inevitably do. 

However nihilistic this article seems to be, please do not perceive it as such. Nothing kills change as effectively as hopelessness. 

That said, this doesn’t invalidate the rage and helplessness of those who are forced to live under the fear of gun violence every passing moment of their lives.

It doesn’t change the fact that the only impetus powerful enough to force legislative action seems to be another room full of dead children. 

It took a white supremacist who killed 10 Black people in Buffalo and a school shooting that killed 19 children and two others for there to be enough legislative support for President Biden to sign the first major gun control legislation in 30 years. 

Is it so much to ask for gun legislation that ensures the safety of our nation before more innocents are rotting under freshly carved tombstones?