When Layla walked through the front door on Tuesday, I folded her into a hug. “I’m glad you’re safe,” I told her, kissing her cheek. “Did you know what happened earlier today in Uvalde?”

Confused, shook her head no. I pulled her into the bedroom and directed her attention to the horror unfolding in real time on TV: an 18 year old gunman killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers in the Texas Hill Country town of Uvalde,  devastating the families, the state and the nation by becoming the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. History.

The only fact sadder than innocent children never returning home to their loved ones is what Conn. Congressman Chris Murphy tearfully told his Republican colleagues soon after the massacre: “This isn’t inevitable. These kids weren’t unlucky. This only happens in this country and nowhere else,” he continued. “It is a choice. It is our choice to let it continue.”

It’s a horror Congressman Murphy knows all too well, as he was literally elected a month before the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012. That December, in Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year-old shot and killed six adults and 20 children. Time and again, somehow only the United States grapples with multiple mass shootings and little to nothing is done about the prevalence of guns……except a bizarre emphasis by Republicans on the lone possible factor of mental health.

“We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world,” Murphy continued. “You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness because we’re not an outlier on mental illness … We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their arms on firearms. That’s what makes America different.”

According to NPR, the U.S. has already witnessed over 200 mass shootings in less than six months: broken down, that miserable math equals 10 a week, for 21 weeks, over 2022’s 145 days. According to some reports, over 600 children in this country have already lost their promising young lives to gun violence, exposing millions more to anxiety, depression and PTSD.

When my siblings and I attended school, all my parents worried about was the specter of stranger danger, the temptation trifecta of sex, drugs and alcohol and the possibility of school fights…..the ones where their children would dodge fists, not actual bullets. When we first moved to Texas, the only safety drills we were taught were for fire outbreaks and tornadoes; now children routinely learn hiding places and defensive positions for random shooters.

It’s a strange time in history to know that lawmakers are quicker to regulate and restrict what women can do with their own bodies, yet circumvent even the possibility of common-sense controls for weapons. Do the heartbeats no longer matter to our lawmakers beyond the fetal stage? How many lives would be saved if those who wanted to purchase guns had to endure the same gauntlet of restrictions that girls and women do to handle a problematic pregnancy?

Over and over again, ever since the Columbine mass shooting of the 90s, there’s been a hollow and heartbreaking cycle that we citizens have been relegated to witness and follow: avoid the proliferation of weapons, experience the shock, pain and devastation of an unforeseen shooting event (mass or otherwise), watch lawmakers circumvent any common sense regulation of said weapons, re-elect the excuse-makers who cash campaign contributions from the gun lobby, and brace ourselves for an inevitable repeat.

We need to stop asking the questions we already know the answer to, and use our hurt, pain and rage against those perpetuating this morbid level of American exceptionalism. We can no longer consider ourselves a great country if we continue paying, statewide and nationally, empty lip service instead of protecting our most valuable resource: human life.