A Few Miles, A Few Years, or Some Intangible Separation

Excuse the dramatic title. I've been feeling a little gloomy. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones revolves around the latest school mass shooting in the U.S. You may be thinking, that has nothing to do with Martinique. However, I really feel it does. As a young person, I left home at a to go to public boarding school, which, while it was still small and in Alabama, was much more diverse in a lot of ways and was where I first started to confront ways of thinking substantially different from those of my parents. From there I moved to New York City, which may very well be the single place on Earth with the most variety of origins, without even mentioning my time at Columbia, which was basically spent learning stuff, forming ideas about it, having those ideas ripped to shreds by my liberal arts-savvy colleagues, being bombarded with their own ideas, and then repeating. More or less immediately I found a way to study abroad, which I did twice before graduating and coming to Martinique. These experiences have given me a chance to learn from a lot of different people's perspectives, but also to see that another way of life is possible. There are many people in the world who do not fear getting shot, neither at home, nor in the street, nor at school. There are many people who never fear that a property line argument will result in a violent death. There are many places on Earth where violent death is a widely-condemned anomaly, universally considered unacceptable and the job of the government to prevent. I have studied and, now, worked in school in such places, and I think those people have gotten something right that we in the U.S. have by and large gotten wrong.
But when I call home, my parents just drum on about loading bullets, buying and trading guns without background checks, and about neighbors getting shot. It's the way they live, and they, like so many others in the U.S., have been fooled into disbelieving that another way of life is possible. That all talk of change is just liberal nonsense.
I don't know how to make them understand that's not true. I don't know how, in the stagnation that is U.S. politics, a change in gun policies might happen.
Realizing that I can't make them understand what I've learned really makes me worry that I'm not fit to help anybody learn.