Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

Editor's note: This story was first published on October 2, 2017, shortly after the shooting in Las Vegas during a country music performance that left 58 dead.

As of today, we are 275 days into the year 2017, and this country has seen 273 mass shootings. The 273rd occurred on Sunday night, in Las Vegas, when a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel rained bullets on an outdoor musical festival below, claiming at least 58 lives and injuring hundreds of others.

If there is anything uniquely exceptional about America right now, it is the normalization of record-breaking mass slaughter. Each new tragedy ought to be the too-horrible thing that turns the tide, finally allowing for a total paradigm shift in the way we talk about gun control. It speaks volumes about American culture that extreme violence has lost the capacity to shock. Las Vegas will be no different if we allow our elected officials to go through their ritualized pageant of sending up “thoughts and prayers” while doing exactly nothing. It’s that old Onion headline all over again: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Firearms are shamefully under-regulated in this country. While details of the Las Vegas shooting continue to emerge, the broader contours of the gun control problem have long ago been cast in sharp relief. It is not too soon to get political. Politics affects everything, from where you get your water to where the latest attacker purchased their assault rifle. There are regulatory policy solutions that would make it more difficult to acquire these weapons. For change to occur, our distraught energy must be translated into an organizational force that insists on an institutional shift in our national approach to violence.

On the most pressing level, gun control efforts must be focused on combating the pro-gun bills currently moving forward in Congress: the Hearing Protection Act of 2017 and the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, which reduce restrictions on the sale of silencers to protect the hearing of gun owners and for hunting’s sake, respectively, and the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, which allows guns to be carried across state borders in states that allow for concealed carry. Both would be a reduction in regulation in an area where there is almost none. Beyond that, there are practical measures to insist upon moving forward, like universal background checks, requirements for safe storage, and banning gun purchases by anyone with a domestic violence protection order. (Nicholas Kristof does a nice job of laying these out in his column on this topic.)

This is an extremely complicated debate, and any one shooting or bill won't change that. And certainly the notoriously aggressive influence of the National Rifle Association complicates matters. But it is absolutely absurd to continue writing this off as simply more proof that the world is an ugly place. It totally is, but Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than are people in other developed countries, and chipping away at that horrifying statistic is going to take a whole lot more than a few sentimental tweets. There are things that can be done, bills to battle for and against, and elected officials who must be compelled to stop compromising or, worse, accepting thinly veiled bribes (see also the $30 million the NRA donated to Donald Trump). The indisputable fact of Las Vegas and each tragedy before it is that extreme violence is part of the standard of living in America. Be part of a vocal consensus that refuses to accept our gruesome reality as an inevitability. We are living in fear, and we have to stop pretending there is nothing we can do to change that.

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Related: How to Help Victims of the Las Vegas Shooting Right Now

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