Fuck what your Facebook friends say — politicizing shootings is the only way to prevent them

It wasn't shocking to wake up to news of 50 dead and more than 200 injured after a shooting at the Route 91 country music festival in Las Vegas. It was terrifying, upsetting, horrific and devastating, but it wasn't shocking.

Every few years, a new mass shooting at some otherwise innocuous place or event (concert, school, nightclub, theater, take your pick) kills dozens of people — sometimes kids — and usurps the previous one as most deadly.

And every time it happens, there are two kinds of responses. Sure, everyone's sad about it — that's a collective thing.

But while half of us are angry not only at the murderer but at lawmakers, lobbies, and legal loopholes that empower the killings, the other half say the same thing:

"Don't politicize a tragedy! Let people mourn!", as if those things are mutually exclusive. It's always on places like Facebook where the user can wax on for 1000 words about how their hearts are where ever the tragedy is, and what an unspeakable horror it is. But that's where it stops.

When people die from mass shootings and you ignore all the ways we could have prevented it under the guise of "not politicizing it", their death is on you. Sorry if that makes you feel bad or uncomfortable, but it is. It's not enough to feel sad for the people who died. It's not enough to say a prayer. You actually have to do something.

If you actually cared about the people who died, you'd want to know what could have prevented it

Pop quiz! What's the underlying connection in mass shootings? Oh yeah, guns. Big, terrible guns designed for one reason: to kill people. If I sound angry, it's because I am. And look, I'm from small-town Texas. My dad's a cop. I've been around guns my entire life. You want a rifle to hunt with a license? Cool. You want to keep a handgun locked in your house to protect against a home intruder? Not my thing, but fine.

You want to walk around with an unlocked semi-automatic weapon slung over your shoulder at a Target like these absolute morons? Nope.

I don't need to tell you we've got a gun problem in America. You see it on the news every day sandwiched between commercials for mesothelioma representation and segments about cat birthday parties. We know we have a problem, and we're not doing a damn thing to fix it.

Here's a breakdown of what we're actually trying to 'politicize'

In my perfect ideal fantasy, there would be zero guns. Like, none. But I know that's unrealistic, and I begrudgingly agree that we can't just take away people's Bill of Rights even though the Founding Fathers, who didn't even wash their ass-cracks, probably didn't write that law so you could bring a machine gun into the McDonalds PlayPlace.

What we can do is try to stem the tide of guns that are already here, like the automatic gun used in Las Vegas (or, y'know, the 10-plus guns they found in the shooter's room.)

Those kinds of guns are designed to kill a huge number of people, and that's exactly what it did. We need to politicize this to put pressure on the only people who can stop it: Congress.

Because we've tried this shit before and it hasn't worked yet. In 2016, in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, President Obama introduced four pieces of gun control legislation, which included:

1. Background checks for people buying guns online and at gun shows

2. No guns for people on the terrorist watch list

3. More resources to prosecute those who violate gun laws

And you can guess what happened. They all failed. There isn't even accurate data about how many automatic and semi-automatic weapons there are in the United States — we physically can't even track the guns that turn murders into massacres. The best guess puts it at around 1.4 million. Now think about how many rounds each one holds.

During a press conference about the failed legislation, Obama perfectly described why we need to capitalize on a horrible tragedy in order to motivate lawmakers into action:

"Somehow we become numb to it and we start to feel that this is normal. And instead of thinking about how to solve the problem, this has become one of our most polarized, partisan debates, despite the fact that there's a general consensus in America about what needs to be done."

Gun homicides kill as many people as car accidents. And you're telling me there's nothing we can do about it but send thoughts and prayers?

You can't go to school, a concert, church, a movie theater, or nightclub without being shot to death and left to bleed out. At some point in your life, you'll know someone affected by gun violence. If this has to be our current reality, I'll be damned if we don't try to fix it for the future.

Don't stop screaming about this, ever

Hurt for the victims. Let yourself ache for the families.

And then get the hell out there and do something so no one else has to go through that pain.

Instead of tweeting your meaningless thoughts and prayers, tweet your local politicians. Scream about it on Facebook. Get into a fight with your conservative uncle at Thanksgiving. If you help even one more person see that gun control is the only way out, you made a big difference.

You can see which congressmen take money from the NRA here so we can vote them out in the upcoming election — they're trading reelection money for your life.

I know it seems overwhelming — because it is. But it's not unfixable, and we're the ones who can do it. Here's an easy form to find your local representatives. Hold those crusty motherfuckers accountable.

Some weird dude is hitting on you at the bar? Instead of putting in a fake number, take his phone and text TOGETHER to 644-33 to sign him up for Every Town gun activist alerts.

Protest, give money, get into a Twitter debate with a MAGA hat-wearing Pepe. If this horrible thing has to happen, take advantage of it. It's on us now, and we've got it.