THERE have been several tragic mass shootings in the past year and one of the most common places where they took place were schools. I discovered appalling statistics on a website called snopes.com, that claims that there has been a total estimate of 18 school shootings since the beginning of 2018, which is 3 per week so far.

That gut feeling you have as a student attending school knowing that you could be in danger or the feeling of a parent sending their child to school thinking that it could be a possibility that they may lose their child whilst at school is not a pleasant one.

To help ease these kind of issues there should be certain rules and guidelines set up not only in schools but in our local communities .Schools should be a secure environment where everyone should feel safe in classes and during lunch time.

As we witness so many unnecessary deaths of innocent people take place in schools and local communities, we need to find more efficient ways to help prevent these tragic incidents from happening.

The idea of having a no gun zone in the area surrounding our local schools is one good way to decrease the chances of gun violence in schools. I have heard many opinions on what can help but none of them caught my attention.

Opinions ranged from urging school cops to check students as they walk onto school campus, learning self defense, and even the idea of teachers being able to carry firearms legally.

From my perspective, I think that the opinions that I gathered from people from were too dramatic and say that if these things were to happen, it would make everybody’s job so much harder.

The importance of conducting fire drills and earthquake drills is stressed commonly, so I think a lockdown drill should be necessary to conduct every month in case of a possible intruder walking into school.

I researched and found more efficient methods to help prevent gun violence at school on a website called cbsnews.com.

I found some interesting ideas that included tightening restrictions on gun sales and implementing things like background checks. In addition, some suggest that we should improve the mental health care system, conduct gun violence research, address illegal firearm sales protection orders, and much more.

One idea that stood out to me as i was reading them was improving the mental health care system.

This was intriguing to me, because even if you have that gut feeling that someone you know isn’t mentally stable, taking action could reduce the possibilities of that person you know becoming the next school shooter.

On a website called scientificamerica.com, I read what most attackers have in common and one thing listed was having difficulties coping with significant losses or personal failures. In addition, most of them more likely had considered or attempted suicide.

Another issue that was addressed above that I thought should be necessary is making the rules around purchases of guns in local communities more strict.

As stated in the constitution of the United States, “The right to keep and bear arms and those rights shall not be infringed.”

The way I see this is that keeping a loaded gun for self defense or protection for your family is legal and should be, and that people with these intentions should not be stopped from purchasing a gun by any means.

This in particular is a good example of why firearms are being issued with no hesitation to anybody. I believe that guns should still be purchased so that people may feel that sense of security that they need, but in order to pursue that I think that background checks should be thoroughly examined.

The saying “if only we could turn back time” gets to me because what if we can change what’s going to happen in the future now instead of having to regret everything we didn’t do in the past.

All these new and efficient ways should be considered so that shootings anywhere may come to a end.

Overall, I think the most important way to help ease these tragedies is to determine whether to help somebody out who is going through a lot. There are a number of things that we can do to prevent shootings in schools, and this isn’t even half of it.