My prayers go out to those students and families of NIU, but our country has real problems.

Forget the concern over gun control or the debates as to why the shooter did what he did, and start focusing on the ignorance that society displays every day.

While this may rub most of the readers the wrong way, I think that we, as students, put too much concern on the Northern Illinois shooting and not on the numerous homicides that occur in our areas each year.

Can anybody recognize the number 435?

That is the number of homicides last year in Chicago.

My question to you is: how many did society hear or care about?

Can you name one victim?

Have you explored one motive? As a white society, we neglect to address these fundamental issues, and upon further review of the situation, one can see that white society is obsessed with their own loss and what happens to them directly.

Amongst this obsession over the lives that were lost at NIU, most people lose sight of all the gun-related homicides that occur everywhere in the United States.

Society ignores those that are not fortunate enough to be in the school system, and thus encounter this violence 10-fold on the streets.

Several people have told me that this is such a huge event because it happened in a school, a “safe” place, but that only begs the question: If we know schools are safe places, and that streets are not, how is it not our responsibility to guide those young persons off the streets and into the school systems?

It is up to you: make the choice, change the streets, be the difference, or turn your back on the youth and the streets, because after all, ignorance is bliss.