Dear Future Students,

I just wanted to say I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that every year the halls of our schools echo with shots fired.
We left the floors wet with the blood of our classmates, a stain that never really goes away.
Parents of our friends still wake up screaming for their son or daughter, but they never came home.
Walls of the classrooms are wounded with bullets, a memorial no one wanted to be reminded of.
The vision on my best friend’s hands clutching the depression in her chest, the depression in her mind magnified by the uninvited guest.
Her life draining from her eyes while the blood drains where she lies,
Curling up in the flames of the destroyer, the guy who entered the school with his finger on the trigger.
Even months after the slaughter the fear never leaves.
A mother watches her calf slaughtered, unable to protect him from the outside.
She calls his phone, but he forgot to charge it that morning and has no battery life left,
He has no life left.

Dear Future Students,

I’m sorry that you won’t be protected like we weren’t.
The government doesn’t want to talk about it.
The NRA doesn’t want to talk about it.
The only people who are willing to talk about it are the people already dead because of it.
No matter how loud the children scream, how many dead bodies fill the holes in the ground, or how much blood is splattered across our memories, they won’t do anything to save these lives.
I’m not saying we have to get rid of guns altogether, but would it hurt to revise gun registration?
How many people need to hurt before government officials stop tweeting their condolences for the families of Parkland and Sandy Hook and start lending a hand to the lives they took.
This is suicide, honoring the children who died, diagnosing them as martyrs for a cause that ripped apart their insides.

Dear Future Students,

Don’t try to be the hero.
When there’s a shooter moving with a dark purpose down the halls, don’t you dare try to save the day.
No matter who you hear screaming across the hall, stay in your room and lock the doors.
The damage done to the bodies of seventeen year-olds and teachers can never be reversed.
All you can do is wait, with only fear and hope left in your heart.
Hey, at least you don’t have to finish that Calculus exam, right?
No, wrong!
Nothing can lessen the wounds and pain caused by the lives that were took in vain.
No matter what training we teach our students, the bullet will never hesitate.
The size of the bullet and barrel won’t make us hurt any less.

It’s time we do more than prepare our students for when an armed student or stranger enters our schools.
Change the regulations, change the laws, make it harder and cumbersome for these scum to get a gun.
Are we too proud to follow the footsteps of Japan and the UK? Yeah, keep telling the younger generations that it’s useless to change the laws.
While we sit here, telling each other that banning guns won’t solve anything, our footsteps are drowning with the blood of our sisters, brothers, fathers, and mothers.
It’s time to stand up and do something about gun control.
It’s time to retire the debate of whether guns kills people or people kill people.
You don’t know the beginning of the suffering the families of Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Virginia tech endured, so how dare you try to pinpoint a philosophy that doesn’t even apply to you.
This homicidal toy is worthy to no victor, and the bullet lodged in our country’s backbone will never be removed until our laws get stricter.