17 dead.

17 dead.

3 teachers.

14 students.

All of them with families, friends, futures.

All of them dead.

And as I scroll down my Twitter feed, seeing this list of 17 names over and over and over again, I can’t help but wonder, why not me?

There’s no reason that that shooting didn’t happen at my high school, that these 17 people weren’t my friends, my teachers. There’s nothing they did to cause a person to come into their school with a semi-automatic rifle and shoot them down. There’s nothing any victim of any of the 18 shootings so far this year and the 346 shootings last year did to deserve what happened to them. All any of them did was leave their house, go to school or to a movie or to a nightclub under the assumption that they would be safe.

Every day, I leave my house under this same assumption.

But now that assumption is all but gone as we, along with every other school in the country, worry that we are going to be next. We as high schoolers should not come to school in fear for our lives every day. We as a country should not be afraid of going out in public, afraid of those around us who may or may not be dangerous and who may or may not be toting guns bought under lax regulations.

The only way to subdue this fear is to pass more restrictive laws regarding guns. We have to take action now, or else nothing is going to change. If we don’t, then we’ll just have another tragedy on our hands within the month – another list of names of those who didn’t survive. And there’s no one stopping those names from being ours.

We have to act now, before it’s too late for us.