One of the most vivid memories of my childhood occurred Dec. 14, 2012. I was 12. I knew something was wrong when I came home, and my mom explained what had happened. I wasn’t even able to understand why someone would ever go to Sandy Hook Elementary School and murder 20 children and six adults. As a seventh grader the same question coursed over and over again through my head: how could someone do this?

Five years later, I still will never understand. But I’ve done my homework. There will always be sick, messed up individuals, Congress can’t control that. What we can control, however, are firearm laws and how we portray these people in the media.

Months after the fact, the Sandy Hook shooting slowly crept out of the news, and gun violence crept back under the rug, but it never left my head. Occasionally, an article or something would surface, saying something like: “Adam Lanza, Sandy Hook Shooter videotaped playing ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ six months before shooting.” Look it up, it’s a real article on DailyMail. I was too young to realize it then, but the media loves to tame these people.

A neighbor of the Las Vegas shooter Steven Paddock described him as a “quiet man, a pilot and a professional gambler.” I do not, nor will I ever care about any article that attempts to unconsciously justify why someone would commit a mass shooting. To make these attackers somehow seem human. They aren’t “lone wolves,” and they aren’t “misunderstood” either. They are terrorists. They may have “led a different life” before the matter, but no one wakes up and decides to launch an attack.

It feels like the trending hashtag is always “#PrayFor (insert city that has fallen victim to yet another mass shooting or attack).” Whether these attacks are centered on a certain group of people, (San Bernadino and Orlando shooting) or simply at random just for highest body count, (26 Sandy Hook or 59 for Las Vegas) they all have something in common: they’re all horrible acts committed by Americans on American soil. Safety should be a valid reason for change.

After all of the shootings I’ve been alive to witness, (too many), I still wonder how we could prevent a domestic terrorist attack from happening ever again. How do we stop gun violence without pissing off gun-toting, second Amendment-preaching Americans? The answer is, we can’t. In the United States, the death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people — the equivalent of 27 people shot dead every day of the year.

No one needs a rapid fire assault weapon that fires off 1,000 rounds in nine minutes for hunting or home protection. That isn’t a good enough argument anymore. Guns continue to fall into the wrong hands. I don’t know what it will take for change to occur, because I guess 20 gunned-down first graders wasn’t enough back in 2012. It wasn’t enough after Columbine, or the countless other killings that have happened over the years. And say what you wish about how “guns don’t kill people, because people kill people.” Obviously not. There needs to be stricter background checks and usage laws for people, not guns. I’m not mad about the guns, I’m mad about the people behind them. If you think I am, then you shouldn’t own one.