Gabrielle Giffords: It’s the guns. It’s always the guns.

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After every shooting, blame and rationalizations fly. I know, because I was shot in the head at a 2011 congressional event near my home in Tucson, Ariz. Eighteen other people were shot at that event, six of whom died. In the weeks that followed, there were all kinds of arguments as to why and how that could have happened. To me, only one rang true: Someone dangerous had access to a gun.

There have now been two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in just over two months. Two separate assailants, in possession of semiautomatic weapons, came terrifyingly close to inflicting great harm. But the through line here isn’t Trump. The through line isn’t the Secret Service. The through line isn’t heated rhetoric. The through line is, as it always is, the guns.

We are a country weary of repetitive gun violence. When that happens, you have a school shooting on a Wednesday and the country’s attention has moved on by Friday. You have a country where shootings on interstate highways appear to be a pattern and students in Kentucky miss several days of school during a manhunt for the perpetrator of the most recent interstate shooting. I imagine many people reading this right now might not even know about that shooting, or that manhunt, or those kids in Kentucky, doing schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school.

Political rhetoric matters — but rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Trump’s golf course, or on the interstate in Kentucky, or in the school hallways in Georgia, or at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Dangerous people with guns were. The most recent would-be attack on the former president, on Sunday, is an indicator of where we are as a nation: a place where no one is safe from gun violence.

There’s no doubt that our political debate needs to cool down. We live in a participatory democracy with a wide range of opinions. We always have times when emotions are running hot; it’s inevitable.

What’s not inevitable is angry or inexplicably violent people having such easy access to guns. In Pennsylvania, a gunman too young to buy a beer nonetheless got his hands on a semiautomatic rifle. In Georgia, the high school shooting suspect was 14, and used an AR-15-style rifle. In Kentucky, the suspected gunman reportedly sent a text message declaring his intention to “kill a lot of people” and then opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Nothing about these episodes was inevitable.

I didn’t grow up in a country with a lot of school shootings, or mass shootings generally. The gun industry was granted broad legal immunity by Congress in 2005 through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a major contributing factor to the soaring number of gun sales. That was great for gun company profits, and terrible for public safety. With the saturation of guns and loosening of gun laws came, unsurprisingly, a saturation of violence. Gun deaths have skyrocketed since the gun industry received that immunity. So when Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, says school shootings are a “fact of life,” he should know: They weren’t a fact of life in this country until guns proliferated and loopholes in our laws allowed dangerous people to get them.

I am, at heart, a political moderate. I believe that successful governing requires a measure of moderation — pragmatic concessions that lead to the breakthroughs that move us forward. The value of moderation is that it allows us to find common purpose and to act on solutions. But moderation without action is merely a different kind of talk, and talk is not what’s wanted or needed now.

How can we tell Americans it’s safe to send their kids to school, to head to the grocery store, to attend concerts or houses of worship — or political events with their families — if we won’t acknowledge the danger that weak gun laws present, and won’t take reasonable steps to keep them secure? All over the country parents are having to answer their children’s questions about whether school is protected, about why these guns threaten their childhoods and their lives.

One thing I learned as a candidate and elected official myself was never to try to talk people out of their own reality. Americans know the dangers of gun violence. They see it in their communities and on their news every week. Now they’ve seen a heavily guarded former president as the target of gun violence twice in just over two months.

And Americans know the difference between action and inaction. Recent research from my gun violence protection organization, Giffords, found that 95% of likely voters in battleground House districts — including 91% of people who voted for Trump in 2020 — support background checks on all gun sales, which would make it harder for dangerous people to get guns. Seventy-four percent of those survey respondents support banning weapons like the AR-15 and the AK-style rifles, the weapons implicated in the events this week, last week and the week before.

I have fought so hard to recover from my grievous wounds. I’ve fought hard to work, to stand shoulder to shoulder with other survivors and demand different gun laws. I’ve worked so hard to find my voice — as hard as it is, as much as I struggle to find the right words — to share not just my story of violence but also my deep belief in the American people, that we can find a different, safer way of living.

It’s Monday morning as I write this. Earlier today, students threw books and papers into their backpacks, grabbed lunch or their water bottles and headed out to school. We have promised them safety, but how can we look them, or their parents, in the face and pretend that the answer is anything other than changing easy access to guns? Our path forward requires us all — leaders, voters, Americans — to name the problem clearly and to take action.

Gabrielle Giffords was a Democratic U.S. representative from Arizona from 2007 to 2012. She is the founder of Giffords, a national organization dedicated to saving lives from gun violence. This article originally appeared in the New York Times.