Two weeks. That's how long it took for our nation to experience yet another school shooting.

Today's shooting at Alpine High School in Texas, left one student wounded, and the student shooter dead as students around the country head back to school for the new school year.

As politicians are sure to offer thoughts and prayers to the victim, students, and Alpine residents, we have to again wonder: how does this keep happening?

The short answer: in politics, money talks. And the gun lobby has lots of it, funneling profits from the gun industry to promote lax gun regulation on Capitol Hill.

For too long, we’ve bounced from tragedy to tragedy with no more than empty rhetoric condemning these senseless acts of violence. What we need is responsible gun control legislation. And to pass it, we need to get gun money out of politics.

Sign the petition to demand campaign finance reform to keep government out of the gun lobby's pocket. 

When ThinkProgress looked into donors to some of Congress’ most ardent gun supporters, the results were unsurprising. In 2015, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who has voted against banning high capacity ammunition magazines, has accepted more than $1.3 million from gun rights groups. Meanwhile, groups like the NRA receive tens of millions of dollars from the nation’s biggest gun manufacturers.

In that time, there have been opportunities to make changes. This past June, Democrats staged a sitting to demand a vote on gun control after the Pulse tragedy. But it went nowhere in a political climate dominated (and funded) by NRA interests.

But we can change that. We’ve come together before to take back political power from corporate interests and big lobbies, like when we called on the SEC to reconsider the disastrous Citizen’s United. And now, in the wake of another gun tragedy, we’re coming together to get money out of politics so we can finally pass gun safety legislation.

Sign the petition to call for campaign finance reform to keep the gun lobby from pulling government's strings.