When Aaron Alexis walked his way onto the Washington Navy Yard grounds Monday, he brought to light that mass shootings unfortunately seem to be a growing fad.

What we know about this guy is that he met his roommate in a Buddhist temple in Texas. What we don’t know is who he was after, why he was after them or why he brought that shotgun into the Yard and started to open fire on seemingly random civilians.

There were 12 casualties in all, 13 if you count Alexis himself. The deceased ranged from ages 46-73 and that moment which seems like an eternity is shrouded in mystery for the time being.

You can not prepare for things such as this. I can’t imagine people wake up in the morning thinking, “Someone probably is going to shoot up where I work today, I better be on the lookout.”

This, of course, is not the first time Americans have had to tread down this road in the recent past. There was a school shooting in Connecticut last year and that guy who thought he was the Joker from Batman shot up the Aurora, Colo. movie theater last year as well.

What are some things we can do, as concerned American citizens, to prevent these things from happening? Or better yet, when they do happen, how to grow from the situation?

— Talk about the families — the attention is always on the bad guy. After all the initial shock the event gives off, and the initial media coverage focuses on the shooter, the general public (along with the media) needs to stand up and make mourning for the families a priority. We focus too much on the person doing the harmful acts, we lose sight of all the men and women who lost their lives for no reason. It’s the attention the shooter gets that attracts so many people to do the same thing.

— Tighten up security, everywhere — according to an article published on washingtonpost.com, with Monday’s shooting in Washington, D.C., six of the most deadly 12 shootings in American history have happened since 2007. That’s a fad in my book. These might not stop for a while, because it is a trend. How to combat that? You need to bulk up security at places that have been targeted before for starters.

— Arm the schools — only the principal and one other person in the school have the code under lock and key. In times of extreme emergency, you have something there to defend yourself. When the mass shooters come to a school, it is because they know there is no reinforcements whatsoever. They can go into a school and rain down acts from hell knowing full well there most likely will be no opposition for them to face

I’m not going to go into gun laws because it is an exhausting tiresome path the Obama Administration has taken us down, or the mental health system that obviously had failed these guys in the recent past. I don’t believe that for a second either.

I will never fully understand anything that goes through these shooters’ minds, but we have to have a call to change something.

If trends stay trends, there are going to have to be changes at schools, military institutions, government buildings and events of high media coverage because I, for one, am sick and tired of waking up seeing that more innocent American lives have been sacrificed for little to no reason at all.