The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting Dec. 14, 2012, left Americans feeling guilty and melancholy. For those who lost a loved one, mourning and grief were common.

While it is impossible to come up with an explanation as to what would drive a person to cause pain and death to innocent children, we have to face the fact this tragedy happened, which opens the unfortunate realization that it could happen again.

Does America want to suffer another tragic event such as this? Another shooting in an elementary school, another 28 lives taken, at a different time? The people of America should face this tragedy and transform it so we can avoid another shooting like this; to make public places, especially schools, safer.

America cannot afford another tragedy like Sandy Hook. The emotional toll in the aftermath of the shooting was unbearable.

I have two younger sisters who are in the fifth and second grade, and I promise you that when I got home that afternoon of Dec. 14, I hugged them a lot tighter than I had the afternoon before. This tragedy could have happened anywhere across the country. This was made clear in the presidential address that night by President Obama:

“Each time I learn the news (of a shooting), I react not as president, but as anybody else would — as a parent. And that’s especially true today. I know there is not one parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.”

Every child across America should feel safe in an educational environment. Children attend school to learn, teach others and enjoy their time there. After the Sandy Hook tragedy, all I want for my younger sisters is to feel safe and protected while in school. I can promise that parents across the country agree.

If America takes this tragedy and turns it into changes to make our schools safer, our children, parents and teachers would feel that way as well.

As a student inside a high school where there aren’t always closed, stable walls or no doors in some areas that close classrooms off from the hallways and from each other, I would be lying if I claimed I haven’t thought, “What if a person with a gun came in here with the same desire as the man who killed all those innocent children?”

The answer: We would all be in danger. We couldn’t move to a classroom with a door and lock in time. Some of my classes are a long way from where I would be sitting, and it’s a risk to move such a distance to a safer room.

If all classrooms had doors with locks, and stable walls that could not be easily opened and destroyed, I would feel safer in my classroom environment.

With personal experiences on my side, and the tragedy of Sandy Hook as a very devastating example, schools across the nation should be forced to have higher safety requirements.

LAUREN WILLIAMS is a Mt. Ararat High School sophomore.