Today marks three years since that awful day back in 2012 when a deranged gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut.

Imagine any other event that took the lives of twenty innocent children and think about what we would do in the United States to prevent it from happening again. But our spineless government did absolutely nothing to help prevent another such tragic event.

Well that isn’t exactly true. In some states, lawmakers have expanded the ability to carry guns. There are now over 12.8 million people authorized for concealed carry across the country.

And yet, there are still regular school shootings.

In fact, since the Sandy Hook attack, there have been 142 school shootings (defined as a gun being discharged on school grounds). Just in 2015 there have been 28 shooting deaths at American schools.

You would think that based on the NRA’s claims that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, these shootings would be all but gone by now. After all, concealed carry permits more than tripled in the US between 2007 and 2014. Those 12.8 million people with concealed carry permits represent an awful lot of “good guys with guns.”

But school shootings are not a thing of the past, nor have they been dramatically reduced, nor do you regularly hear about “good guys with guns” stopping such school shootings.

It is truly sad that we cannot engage in meaningful research or debate about how to solve the problem. When the first thing out of gun rights folks are the same old phrases that “guns don’t kill people” and “only criminals will have guns,” you know we aren’t getting anywhere.

The question is, what will it take to finally cause us to hit the breaking point?