When is enough enough?

Every time it becomes a little more real. It hits home, especially when it happens on another college campus.

Americans are becoming all to used to sinking stomach and knots in throats as they heard news of yet another mass shooting. It happened again Thursday.

State officials said in a news conference at least 10 people were killed and at least seven more were injured after a shooter attacked Umpqua Community College in Roseberg, Ore., on Thursday morning. The community college shooting is the 45th school shooting in 2015, according to Everytown for Gun Safety’s website, an organization that advocates for gun law reforms to reduce violence.

Thursday’s shooting was also the 142nd school shooting since 26 people died in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in December 2012. According to its website, Everytown uses the FBI definition of mass shooting, which is an incident in which four or more people are murdered with a gun, to determine its numbers of school shootings.

While these numbers seem like a cold, sad reality nowadays, these massive acts of violence and murder are not a universal truth among developed countries. In fact, according to research from The Guardian and published on Vox.com, the United States’ numbers of homicides by gun are dramatically higher than other developed nations.

The United States averages almost 30 homicides by gun per one million people, according to the published report. This is extremely high compared to other developed countries such as Switzerland with 7.7 homicides and Australia, whose number is dramatically lower at 1.4 homicides per one million citizens.

The United States also has just over 4.4 percent of the world’s total population but also has 44 percent of the civilian-owned guns in the world. The United States is the only advanced country on Earth to deal with mass shootings every few months, President Barack Obama said in a live statement Thursday afternoon.

But the reality is these horrible mass shootings are not about the numbers, no matter how compelling they might be. These mass shootings are about the people — the killed or injured and their families. It’s about the people who are traumatized by watching their friends and classmates die or parents who have to suffer through agonizing minutes and hours waiting to find out if they’re the ones who lost a child.

In cases of school shootings, those who are killed and injured are students exactly like us. The students who lost their lives could have been walking to class or buying a cup of coffee. Just like all of ISU students, the people who have been killed had dreams, futures and were working to make their lives better through education.

So, when is enough enough?

Gun control is clearly a hot-button political issue. But isn’t it time to put aside political differences and stop the killing? Quite frankly, it is time to reform gun laws.

While there is no disputing that the majority of gun owners in our country are probably responsible and safe with their weapons, our country has proved time and time again that it is way too easy for killers to get their hands on firearms. While it may be argued those who want to kill will do so with or without a gun, firearms make killing significantly easier and more destructive.

This is a desperate plea, from students just like the ones who died Thursday morning at school, to make our world safer. In institutions created to build brighter and better futures for all those who attend them, lives are ending prematurely and in the most tragic of ways.

How many more people have to die before some sort of action is taken?

We are fed up with a lack of reform coming from our country’s legislature.

We understand the Second Amendment is there for a reason. But clearly something isn’t working. We don’t know the definite answer, and one may not exist. It’s time to start paying attention. It is time to put an end to the petty politics and take action.