At 4:05 p.m. on Dec. 13, 2025, a masked shooter entered the Barus & Holley, Prince Lab building and opened fire. Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, did not make it out of the room alive, as they were murdered by the gunman. An additional nine students were wounded.
While the cries of the community were equal to the immeasurable loss suffered, the silence from Washington, D.C., and those who occupy the seats of power, has been deafening.
In 2025 alone, the United States had 408 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. School shootings accounted for 233 of that total. Guns are now the leading cause of death for kids aged 1 to 17, more than car crashes and cancer.
We have become so desensitized to students being killed that shootings have lost the ability to shock. The national reaction to school shootings has become calcified into a disturbed ritual. After a school shooting, candles are lit, “thoughts and prayers” are given, flags are lowered and then by the weekend, everyone moves on until tragedy strikes again.
I vividly remember the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. I thought, perhaps naively, that our leaders would take action to prevent another tragedy. Seventeen people were killed in their high school; students shot at their desks. And still, it wasn’t enough to cause reform.
Lawmakers, who have the burden of action placed upon them, choose “thoughts and prayers” over legislative reform. “Thoughts and prayers” is a way to sound compassionate while acting compassionless. It treats the mass murder of our students as an unavoidable feature of growing up in the U.S., rather than a solvable issue.
Prayers will not stop parents from burying their kid. Sympathy without action is not leadership, it’s complicity.
Almost every other country has faced the issue of mass shootings at some time; they face the issues of mental illness, social isolation and anger just as we do, yet they do not accept school shootings as fated to be. After the shooting at Bondi Beach, which was the same day as the Brown University shooting, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a gun buyback program to prevent another shooting.
Shootings are not inevitable; they are a choice, and one the U.S. has made over and over again.
Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov likely woke up the morning of Dec. 13, 2025, thinking about grades, wondering if they studied enough for their finals or looking forward to holiday break. Instead, that afternoon was their last.
However, they will by no means be the last victims of school shootings; hundreds more will die until the U.S. values life over guns. Until our leaders decide that students deserve sympathy before they are already dead, the issue of mass shootings will never be fixed.
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Christian Poppell is a first year majoring in political science with a minor in international studies. He is a writer for the Opinion section of The Miami Student.
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