The Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which took the lives of 17 students and teachers, has sparked a national conversation about gun control laws in the country.

North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper posted on Wednesday on the website Medium, exactly one month after the shooting, his current actions and goals for combating gun violence in North Carolina.

Cooper said that he has already requested that the North Carolina Department of Public Safety direct law enforcement and school administrators to ensure that rapid deployment training and school emergency response plans are in order.

However, according to Cooper, being prepared is not enough and a change to gun laws in necessary.

Cooper wrote that we “need to strengthen the background check system to make our communities safer and keep guns from violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill.”

Currently, North Carolina law requires a permit from the local sheriff’s office, with a federal background check, in order to buy a handgun. However, the law allows anyone in the state to buy an assault weapon like an AR-15, the weapon used in Parkland, in a less restrictive process.

Other changes Cooper said North Carolina lawmakers should enact include raising the legal age of sale of weapons to age 21, requiring anyone buying weapons – in store, online or at a gun show – to go through the same background checks and permit processes, and banning “bump stocks,” devices that allow semi-automatic guns to mimic automatic weapons. This type of device was used in the Las Vegas shooting last year to carry out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Cooper went on to state in his post that he has directed the State Bureau of Investigation to undertake a comprehensive inventory of the quality of information that North Carolina shares with the federal background check system to make sure critical information is not being missed.

Cooper also mentioned the need for better diagnosis and treatment for people with mental illness, advocated for North Carolina closing the health care gap by accepting federal funds that are offered to cover 500,000 more North Carolinians and increasing the number of school personnel who receive youth and adult mental-health first-aid training.

This post comes on the same day as coordinated walkouts across the country where high school students walked out of school at 10 a.m. for 17 minutes in the name of gun reform and to honor the victims lost in the Parkland shooting.

To read Governor Cooper’s full post, click here.

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