The shooting of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has reignited the debate over how to stop such tragedies from occurring, with outspoken student survivors giving the issue even more emotional force by demanding swift action from lawmakers.

There is no reason for students to have to worry about getting gunned down at school, and it is undeniable that the frequency of mass shootings is a bigger problem in the United States than in other countries.

After witnessing these scenes all too often, it is natural for people to demand public policy responses to these massacres. It’s hard to grapple with a world in which something like this can happen, and so it can be psychologically comforting to try and reassert control by searching for easy answers. This impulse leads people to assert that there are simple solutions to end this plague of violence. These include ideas such as increasing background checks, banning some guns, increasing funding for mental health problems, or increasing security at schools.