Two weeks ago, a 15 year old opened fire in his Kentucky high school and killed two of his classmates. Despite the horrible tragedy and the serious implication of this being the thirteenth mass shooting in the first month of 2018, the news cycle quickly moved on to other distressing stories, which seem to be in no short supply recently.

What may have been front page news ten years ago, or even five, has become another footnote in the growing list of this country’s mass shootings. It seems every day there are more victims, more statistics, and more debate over how to deal with the ridiculously inflated number of attacks. Bailey Holt and Preston Cope are the newest additions to the list of casualties every American mourns and moves on from soon after.

I’m tired. In fact, I’m exhausted. I think, in a way, we all are. It’s hard to care. To put in the emotional work, reflect, and grieve. No person can maintain the level of outrage these tragedies call for. I’m tired of waking up every morning and dreading the news alerts that I have seen too often. I’m tired of performing lockdown drills while the kid next to me in class shops Wal-Mart’s gun selection “just for fun.” I’m tired of wondering where the next shooting will be. A movie theater? A concert? An elementary school? I’m tired of wondering when the other shoe will drop. Again. And again. And again.

What I’m most tired of, though, is the arguments used over and over to explain why this keeps happening. Politicians insist nothing can be done and move legislation at a glacial pace until the American people are distracted by the President’s latest incorrect tweet or powerful figure’s sex scandal. While those topics are worthy of attention, our willingness to push away the complex emotions of a national tragedy so quickly is troubling. It’s that conscious ignorance that prevents change. Outrage fuels the fire of progress; without it, we are doomed to remain frozen in our present complicity.

When it comes down to it, it’s not about violent video games or the lack of support for the mentally ill or any other vague excuse we try to come up with the to justify the capacity for multiple individuals to take so many lives. It’s how they are able to. When it comes down to it, the only way to prevent mass shootings is to control what and how many guns are available to Americans every day. Our right to feel safe is more important than the Founding Fathers’ assertion that every man should have the right to a musket in his home.

At this point, we have to choose whether the 2nd Amendment is worth the lives of the Baileys and Prestons we lose every day. Would you rather have a gun to “protect yourself from other people with guns” or not need one in the first place? Would you rather hunt with a semi-automatic rifle or not have to fear looking down the barrel of one while you sit in class? Amendments can be changed; laws can be changed. The insistence on keeping an outdated and downright dangerous provision in our Constitution is fundamentally harmful.

When 26 children and teachers were killed in Sandy Hook and the country did nothing, I knew the shootings would never stop. If legislators were willing to pretend there was no way those deaths could have been prevented, there’s no reason it wouldn’t happen again. The time for civil debate, careful political maneuvering, moderacy, and common ground is over. It’s time to do something. Anything. Even the smallest restrictions could prevent the next tragedy.

Two days after the attack in Kentucky, a teenager in Fayette County, an hour from Wexford, was arrested for stockpiling weapons and orchestrating a mass school shooting at his high school. This isn’t a something that happens “somewhere else.” It could have happened here. I’m tired of wondering when. And you should be, too.