The Parkland school shooting is something that you keep hearing about every single day since it happened. Some people are completely numb to it at this point. “Oh, another school shooting.” It’s tragic. It keeps happening. But what can we do to resolve it? I have no idea but everyone bickering back and forth about gun control, mental illness, should these kids be smiling, why are they protesting, bad things just happen….. none of these things are helping us. I’m not going to argue for or against gun control. But what I will do is tear apart this disaster.

First of all, this idea that corporations like Avis and Enterprise working with the NRA to give members discounts is really nothing to me. I didn’t know it was a thing before. Good for them standing up on an issue and cutting ties with a money-maker for them. Am I upset that FedEx has announced that they won’t do the same? No. Again, wasn’t aware they had a partnership with them and it’s not like they are making laws in favor of gun freedoms so the fact that they get money from the NRA is really meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

My issue with FedEx is when they say “We are totally against the sale of assault rifles but we’re good with taking the NRA’s money.” That’s a cop-out. If you were really against it, you wouldn’t take their money. What you mean to say is “since there is so much outrage on this topic, we are going to say that we are against their policies to appease customers and impress them that we are being transparent enough to admit that we are still taking their money.” You can’t have it both ways. (Again, I reiterate, I have no feelings on the boycott of these companies for their association with the NRA. I really don’t care. I care when politicians are in the pockets of organizations and make laws that financially benefit the aforementioned organizations.)

Every time a school shooting happens, there is talk of “what can we do to stop it from happening again?” Then, people forget that it happened and shirk their responsibilities in preventing it from happening again. Then, it happens again and it becomes a cycle of outrage then apathy then ignoring the issue until it happens again. I don’t want to look up statistics on how many of these shooters somehow obtained their weapons legally when they really shouldn’t have, such is the case in the Parkland school shooting. Statistics can be skewed and I like facts. The fact is that he probably could have gotten the gun anyways. They keep asking the questions “what did he use to shoot up the school and how did he get the items?” “Why was he able to get a gun?”

Those are the wrong questions to ask. The question we should be asking is “why did he shoot up the school?” The why is always more important, in my opinion. Because when you know the “why”, you can really address the problem and help find solutions to fix it.