Elisabeth Wilder is a junior at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va. This speech won second place in the EMU C. Henry Smith oratorical contest. 

It’s easier for me to accept the fact that there was a shooting in my hometown than to believe that we are still refusing to take gun control seriously.

On February 25, 2016 my safe, boring, small hometown of Hesston, Kansas got the rude awakening of a lifetime when a disgruntled man chose to take out his pain and agony on the employees of Excel Industries. This poor, broken human with a history of violence obtained an AK-47 and a glock, making the decision to use violence to solve his problems. In his terror, the man took the lives of three employees and wounded fourteen others. The violence ended with more violence as our town police chief made the seemingly only choice to stop the massacre by killing the gunman.

Reality has finally set in on Hesston, Kansas. Mass shootings have become so common that even this supposed safe, Mennonite haven could not remain untouched. Though I am overwhelmingly proud of the outpouring of love, grace, and support that I have witnessed in my community, it quite frankly isn’t enough.

Because Hesston isn’t alone in their pain, and this isn’t a rare occurrence.

Days before there was #PrayersForHesston, six people were murdered in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Shortly after #HesstonStrong was trending on social media, four people were killed at a shooting range in Belfair, Washington where the gunman eventually turned the gun on himself. And before most of America even knew about my tremendous, resilient community, 47 mass shootings had already taken place in 2016 according to PBS.

This is madness; not because we are living in an era of extreme violence, but because we are so numb to this terror that we have continually chosen not to respond and demand justice. We are no longer shocked when the news of a mass shooting pops up on our Facebook feed or makes an appearance on the news; it is simply the reality we live in.

By reality, I mean the façade we have sold ourselves here in the United States. We have been fed the lie that nothing can protect us from these incidents. These tragedies are supposedly but a symptom of increases of violence everywhere; even though the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to see these record high mass shootings. Truly I tell you, this is not reality, but the deceit of gun lobbyists who are trying to protect their own best interest.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have to take action.

As followers of Christ, we are not just called, but required to act justly according to the words of Micah 6:8. With prayer, spiritual guidance, and a radical call to follow in the ways of Jesus Christ, we can no longer sit passively by as another community grieves its loss of comfort and begins to turn towards anger and fear. A few weeks ago, it was my community, but if we continue to stand back as more and more people arm themselves in paranoia, it may be yours.

Enough is enough.

We have the power to take back the narrative of our nation from stories of grieving, coping, and devastation to stories of change, transformation, and revolution. It’s time we stop being bystanders and start being proactive.

I am so sick of hashtags asking for prayers, vigils for victims and survivors, t-shirts with names of people no longer with us, and waking up in a country where the right to own a weapon is valued more than the lives of citizens. Please tell me that you, too, are tired of hearing the same heartbreaking stories with different names and different locations. We cannot keep responding to these events with the mentality of surviving rather than thriving. Hashtags and sharing articles on Facebook are just not enough. It’s time to stop making hashtags and start making change.

I’m done with this nonsense of a waiting for a “good guy with a gun” to come and rescue us from this violence. I want proactive people with papers, protests, and petitions. Give me letters to legislators, walkouts, and civil disobedience. Do not fool yourselves into believing that you don’t have the power to change this world. For our Creator has revealed in Philippians 4:13 that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. We are only alone in this fight if we choose to believe that we are alone.

My words are not ideological sentiments, as I fully embrace the reality of an insidious gun culture in our nation. But for too long we have told ourselves that the work in heaven must stay in heaven, and that the work here on earth is to remain pragmatic. Have you not heard that to be too heavenly bound is to be of no earthly good? The Kingdom of Heaven is closer than we realize.

It’s time to start getting serious about gun control. We must pressure our legislators and representatives to sponsor bills that require thorough background checks. It is our duty to dispel the myths that an increase in guns will increase our safety—because with approximately one gun per person in the United States we are still the leading nation in terms of mass shootings.

Most radically, we must begin our work for a total ban on assault rifles, because the truth is that four people from Hesston, Kansas would most likely still be with us if we had taken gun control seriously four years ago when twenty children and six teachers lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

We cannot keep holding our tongues until we are given the right moment to speak. Our call to action has rung countless times over the last several years. The call to move resounded in 2015 with the San Bernardino and Charleston shooting, in 2014 at a shooting range in Fort Hood, Texas, and in 2012 at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. The call has gone out again and again, and yet we are still waiting to make change.

I’m not asking to end mass shootings by the end of 2016, but I am asking that we take more steps to solving the problem rather than just holding our loved ones a little closer. Our steps can be as simple as getting involved with the Brady Campaign, which is a network of grassroots organizations seeking to prevent gun violence. We can partner with the Education Fund to Stop Gun Violence or Every Town for Gun Safety, which provide resources and information to tackle the ignorance and apathy surrounding gun policies. Or perhaps our steps can be as grand as devoting our lives to education, law, or social work, turning our vocations into ministries.

The bottom line is that we need to be moving and working to create methods of prevention rather than responding with the same song and dance when tragedy occurs. If a doctor kept prescribing aspirin to a patient with a heart condition rather than performing surgery, we would say that the doctor was only treating the symptoms of the real problem. Why then, do we keep numbing our pain to these horrific events rather than tackling the underlying issues?

We’ve got a long road ahead of us until we are rid of this infectious disease, but if we are going to really treat the problem, we can’t just lie down and play dead. It’s going to take work, endurance, and lots of teamwork, but it’s better than living with the alternative, which is living in a nation where mass shootings, gun violence, and trauma regularly happen.

As we grieve what has happened in Hesston and across our nation, let our tears flow into a river of justice, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. May our words of comfort turn into calls for action. And with our prayers, let’s do more than hope that this doesn’t happen again.

In the words of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, after the Senate voted down a change in gun legislation in December of 2015 after two mass shootings occurred in the same day: “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”