Remember the times when you were able to travel on an airplane and the only thing that you were afraid of was the airplane crashing or maybe your luggage being lost when you got to your destination?

Now, every second that I’m on an airplane, I’m looking around paranoid, waiting to tackle the first person that looks suspicious. Who wants to live like that?

Nobody. But this is the world we live in today.

I wish that I could go back to my years as an adolescent, because even if the world wasn’t less violent 10 years ago, it certainly seemed to be. Different activities that families should be able to enjoy together have been tainted by recent violence.

For instance, every year on Christmas Day, my family goes to the movies.

Typically in a theater, you would snack on your popcorn or homemade goods that you illicitly snuck in, and become so drawn in to the film that you would forget where you were. Not anymore. Well, at least not for me.

This past Christmas, my family and I went to the movies to see “Django Unchained.” Though the movie was 180 minutes long, I only watched about 100 minutes of it because I was too busy looking around every other minute in fear that someone would start shooting.

There was also a lot of chaos occurring in the theater. Someone vomited on the floor, causing about 10 people to get up and hurriedly exit. As I was seated on the opposite side of the theater, I was unaware of the vomit and began fearfully questioning why all these people got up at the same time.

Luckily, “Django Unchained” wasn’t a movie that I regret missing, and I’ll save my dislike for that movie for another column. But there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be able to enjoy the movies the same because of the Colorado movie theater massacre.

When I was a child, and still to this day, my parents always told me to keep my purse close to me at all times and never count my money out in the open in shopping malls. Now, when shopping, there’s more to take into consideration than purse snatchers.

This past December, there was a shooting in an Oregon mall that left many dead or injured. As people were perhaps shopping for Christmas presents, a gunman opened fire in the mall. No one would have thought that a shopping mall would turn into a deadly crime scene, but it did. For some, shopping in an Oregon mall, or any mall for that matter, will never be the same again.

Maybe you don’t go to the theater or the mall, so you can’t imagine how the experience today has been some-what ruined.

However, school is a place that almost everyone can relate to. The Newtown, Conn. school shooting affected, and is still touching, everyone around the world.

Children are being dropped off at school every morning by parents worrying about bigger and more frightening issues — someone bringing a gun into the school.

The school atmosphere isn’t seen as a safe place anymore.

I remember my sister was at Northern Illinois University when the shooting took place on Feb. 14, 2008. This not only changed my perspective of the safety measures at school, but it influenced me not to sit in the front of lecture halls.

Not only does my paranoia need to go away, but this violence has to stop.

Individuals should be able to go about their everyday lives and enjoy fun things in their leisure time without the worries of being harmed.

Taking away guns is obviously not the answer because authoritative figures that protect everyday citizens need them.

However, if more effective gun laws aren’t instated, more massacres will occur and more lives will be lost.

It is my hope that the world will become a safer place and that my future child will be able to be worry-free, as I once was.

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