PITTSBURGH -- “Love thy neighbor as thyself. No exceptions.”

More than 10 months after the horrific massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the city of Pittsburgh is still draped in banners, yard signs, and stickers bearing this commandment. As a Jewish student at the University of Pittsburgh, I am constantly surrounded by remnants of this message and the whirlwind of emotions that come along with it.

I’m reminded of sitting in my apartment, a mile away from the synagogue, watching ambulances race down the street outside my window. I’m reminded of texting my friends and mentors with shaky hands in a desperate attempt to make sure they were still alive. I’m reminded of drowning in fear.

There’s no escaping these memories. The shooting will forever be a pivotal and traumatic moment in my life, forever be part of the fabric of Pittsburgh, forever be imprinted on the Jewish American psyche.

The one thing that the shooting will never be, however, is surprising. You might think that I should have been shocked that 11 members of my community were viciously gunned down by a known anti-Semite with an AR-15 assault rifle and three Glock .357 handguns who stormed into their holy space and screamed, “all Jews must die,” before firing indiscriminately at the worshippers. But I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t surprised.

My generation, as a whole, wasn’t shocked. We simply don’t believe that “it will never happen to us.” If anything, we know that our own experiences with gun violence are not predicated on questions of if gun violence will play a role in our lives, but when.

But it’s not that we don’t care.

Kathryn Fleisher, a native Clevelander, is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh and founder and executive director of “Not My Generation: Summit for Young Adults Against Gun Violence."

We aren’t shocked because we’ve grown up in an America that doubles as a war zone; a country against which Amnesty International placed a travel warning because “rampant gun violence” has “become so prevalent in the US that it amounts to a human rights crisis.”

We’re a generation that’s been collectively traumatized by gun violence.

This deeply personal and profoundly traumatic relationship with gun violence has given us a unique understanding of the issue; an understanding that fundamentally differs from that of older generations that made peace with leaving the American gun-violence crisis for us to solve.

Increasingly, it seems as though we are the first generation to widely understand the complexities of gun violence, to understand that gun violence is more than just mass shootings. It’s an epidemic that includes police brutality, domestic violence, suicide by firearm, gang violence, targeted assault, daily violence, hate crimes, accidental shootings, and more.

We want to scream at the people who write off our fears: “Don’t you see how one piece of machinery turns harmful situations lethal, impulsive decisions deadly, and internalized hatred into a national crisis?”

Yet they claim to not see what we mean. They write us off as being too young, too idealistic, too naïve to understand the issue that’s left our friends and peers bleeding out in our classrooms and on our streets. Instead, they make excuses; they say there’s nothing we can do to prevent this onslaught of violence. They refuse to protect us; refuse to put our lives above their National Rifle Association membership.

We cannot afford to listen to them any longer.

These tragedies, these sources of bloodshed and tragedy – while disparate – share a common denominator. They’re caused by, enabled by, and made worse by firearms.

By instituting commonsense gun reform, we have the power to curb gun violence, if not prevent it entirely. But in order to do this, we, as a country, have to make a collective decision to value human lives over outdated rights, to protect our children more than we protect our guns. We have to be honest with ourselves and with one another about the systems and structures that allow the gun violence epidemic to thrive in the United States.

We can prevent gun violence. But we have to understand and accept the complexities of the issue first.

My generation has come to terms with the reality that the racist, sexist, xenophobic structures upon which American society is built exacerbate the gun epidemic. Now we’re begging the rest of the country to come to terms with this reality, too. If we are to prevent the next Tree of Life shooting or the next El Paso shooting or the next Dayton shooting or the next “insert any American city name here” shooting, we must listen to young people’s cries: An intersectional approach to gun violence prevention is the only way forward.

Research and data have already proven the effectiveness of commonsense gun-reform policies such as assault weapons bans, universal background checks, and safe storage laws. Now, we must combine intersectional gun-violence-prevention activism with comprehensive legislative and regulatory changes. And we must do it now, not a decade from now.

We must figure out if sustaining the NRA or sustaining the well-being of the next generation of Americans is more important to us.

It’s time to get our priorities straight.

Kathryn Fleisher, a native Clevelander, is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh studying politics & philosophy and gender, sexuality, & women’s studies. She is the founder and executive director of “Not My Generation: Summit for Young Adults Against Gun Violence;" a co-chair of the Reform Jewish Movement’s Gun Violence Prevention Campaign, and a Giffords Courage Fellow.

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