As you’re reading this, a child in the United States could be dying from a gunshot. There have been over 300 mass shootings so far in 2015, 45 of which have taken place in schools.

These stats come from www.shootingtracker.com, because yes, there are enough mass shootings in America to need an entire website to keep track of them. Because of the frequency of these acts of violence, we have become desensitized to their severity. But just because a shooting has never happened here, doesn’t mean it’s not happening somewhere else right now, or that it couldn’t happen at our own school.

There are likely Sequoia High School students with access to guns.

To put things in perspective, thousands more lives have been lost from mass shootings in the past decade than from terrorist attacks, including 9/11. If the U.S. is taking extensive military action against terrorist organizations such as ISIS to prevent deaths of innocent people, why shouldn’t our government take action by restricting guns and preventing deaths even closer to home?

These incidents have become so common that many schools, including Sequoia, have lockdown drills to practice how to respond to one of these incidents if it happens. Students shouldn’t have to go through these procedures every year. A school should be a safe environment, not a place where gun massacres are anticipated.

In an interview with the Raven Report, pro-gun senior Juventino Vargas  the Third explained his views on gun control. He does believe in some gun regulation, such as tighter background checks, but he claims that guns are necessary to an average American citizen.

“If we had more guns on campuses throughout the United States, I think we would have more protection (not more violence),” Vargas said. “If we take guns away from law-abiding citizens, criminals will still have them.”

While it is true that people will have access to weapons on the black market, outlawing guns would still make it much harder for them to find. The easiest way to acquire illegal guns is still via purchases made through licensed dealers, which can then be sold to or fall into criminal hands.

Some gun advocates cite the Second Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights, which protects citizens’ right to bear arms. However, the Second Amendment no longer stands as a viable argument against gun control, because it was written 300 years ago. At that time, the founding fathers didn’t imagine the gun violence epidemic that this amendment would end up causing today.

The Constitution was made to be changed. We changed it by abolishing slavery, and we changed it by giving women the right to vote, so what’s keeping us from getting rid of guns?

The United States would not be the first country to adopt new gun restrictions. In 1996, a huge massacre took place in Port Arthur, Australia. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard took action 12 days later by imposing new laws banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns. One third of the nation’s gun supply was destroyed. The results were a drop in homicides by firearm of 59 percent.

These tragedies are preventable: we just need to restrict access to these dangerous weapons. It’s crucial that everyone in the Sequoia community and beyond stops turning a blind eye to the gun control debate and starts seeing reason.

Guns are a bomb waiting to go off. Turning the safety on isn’t enough, it’s time that we retire these instruments of destruction for good.