On Monday, Oct. 21, a student opened fire in a middle school in Nevada, marking the seventh officially classified school shooting in the U.S. in 2013 alone. Take note of the specification that the term “school shooting” implies. This statistic does not include the calamity at the Washington Naval Yard from earlier in the semester.

Members of the Simmons Voice Editorial Board disagreed on what the determining factor was in the tragedies of the past year, but we eventually came to an agreement. We decided that there are two major influences that lead to shootings such as the one in Nevada: a lack of gun control laws, and a flawed system for those who need mental health treatment.

The former is obvious: even if students are too young to own guns, they can easily obtain them from their parents, as is evident in the most recent case in Nevada. In the case of the Santa Monica College shooting in June 2013, the shooter, John Zawahri, was denied a permit to buy a gun in 2011. However, he was able to put together an AR-15-style gun using parts that he bought from different, legal, sources. The gun he constructed was not legal, but the means he used to construct it were.

In the Nevada school shooting that occurred Monday, the student is said to have used a handgun taken from his parents to injure two of his classmates and kill a math teacher who tried to negotiate with him before taking his own life. Because the student is a minor and information regarding him is highly restricted, it is unclear whether he was suffering from a mental illness.

But the shooting at Santa Monica College earlier in 2013 fits the bill for many other mass shootings of late. The shooter was a young man who obtained access to high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, despite the gun control laws already in place, and has been in and out of the system for mental health problems.

In most of the cases reviewed from the past year, people close to the shooter were able to recount warning signs that should have been obvious. Zawahri was actually admitted to a psychiatric ward in 2006, but was released shortly thereafter. It is too soon after the Nevada instance to know exactly what the motive was behind the shooting, but it’s sure to look like some of the patterns that have been established over the years.

Hindsight is 20/20, but given what we’ve learned from previous tragedies, one would think that there would be a better system in place to identify perpetrators of such events. Whether it be by educating parents, teachers, or even the students, why isn’t more being done to anticipate school shootings?