After the events of the past week, I am just feeling drained and honestly experiencing a bit of despair.

Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old political activist who had invigorated the conservative movement on college campuses, was assassinated by a young man in Utah. Despite what commentators and those joining in the fray online are saying, no motives have been revealed. The shell casings had language written on them which indicate leftist leanings, but those are also sayings used by far right leaning young people playing violent video games used to mock others.

As the shooter was captured alive, I am sure we will learn more as he, his friends, and his family are interviewed, but the frenzy is indeed at a fever- pitch. There are those who want to point fingers at “the other team” to somehow not be labeled as a part of the reason that a sick person decided to silence a political voice who dared to speak out in public.

On the same day, two high schoolers were shot by a third student at a high school in Colorado. While the Kirk murder dominated the news due to his star power and the fact that it was a political assassination, I was demoralized with how little people seemed to care that another school shooting had occurred in our nation. This especially struck me as a friend of mine has two children who currently attend that school.

A few days ago, security.org published an article which did not improve my demeanor. According to them, a report released by K-12 School Shooting Database, a publication of the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS), shows a total of 118 active shooter incidents have been reported at K-12 schools in the U.S. since 1999.

These shootings are defined by the CHDS as situations where the perpetrator killed or wounded targeted or random victims within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence.

If you want to know the death total from those shootings, since 1999, 440 people have been killed and 1,243 injured in shooting events at these schools. If you want to delve into the compiled data, k12ssdb.org/all-shootings shows a breakdown of various data points.

Any violent action against another human is a crime. When it comes to young people dying, whether it be a young father daring to speak about politics or students who should be safe in their school, it feels that much more of a tragedy.

I am not going to get into the gun debate as I am a gun owner and strongly believe in the Second Amendment, but I also realize that something must be done to keep guns away from people who are going to use them for no other reason than to commit a crime.

Last year, a Michigan judge sentenced parents of a convicted mass school shooter to 10 years in prison for “repeated acts, or lack of acts, that could have halted an oncoming runaway train” in not acting to stop their 15-year-old son from murdering four other students in 2021.

Is this the perfect solution? No. Has someone else come up with something to stop these horrific acts? The answer is also, “No.” I do know that cuts to mental health support which we are seeing at both the state and national level will certainly not reduce these numbers.

If you want to see better and live safer, now is the time to engage your policymakers at all levels and demand that these two latest shootings not just be the most recent in a long line of senseless tragedies that deprived families of their loved ones.

– The Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy was established in 1983 by a group of citizens seeking to create a strong advocacy network that would provide a voice for the needs of children and youth in Oklahoma, particularly those in the state’s care and those growing up amid poverty, violence, abuse and neglect, disparities, or other situations that put their lives and future at risk. Our mission statement: “Creating awareness, taking action and changing policy to improve the health, safety, and well-being of Oklahoma’s children.