Check this out. Here's as essay on an "ANTI" site called : Reflections on Gun Control. Let's see if this person is willing to be intellectually honest, or if she just does NOT LIKE guns.

Guns and Children

So how do I feel about guns? I don't feel safe in the presence of one. Based on personal observation over half a lifetime, I have no reason to believe that each and every person who is eligible to buy a gun will, in all circumstances, act in a safe and responsible manner. Especially if it is a very young or very emotional person. Immaturity and guns are a dangerous combination.

Teenagers and hotheads have no business possessing weapons of any kind. Teenagers are going through dramatic changes in their lives, and everything seems so intense to them. A small disagreement this week is the end of the world, and next week it has been completely forgotten and they have moved on to something else. This is due in equal part to hormonal changes to their bodies and trying to learn how to fit in and be accepted. They are tremendously insecure. They are under a lot of pressure. To allow a teenager to have a gun is like shaking nitroglycerine -- it will explode.

I will not address the subject of guns being purchased by criminals and psychotics who intend to hurt someone. No one can predict who will go "psycho" next and thus prevent a mass murder/suicide in some office or restaurant. This kind of crime will continue as long as there are angry, poorly-socialized individuals and weapons of any kind available to them. I'm just thankful it is sporadic.

My belief is that no one is safe as long as there are weapons available to the public and there are lazy, irresponsible, or ignorant people using them. I wish the "responsible gun owner" that the NRA is always talking about were more than just an ideal, a goal to strive for. Heck, I wish we lived in a perfect world, but we don't. Until someone can figure out how to change human nature, there will always be some danger.

My main concern, however, is the continuing problem of children and guns, the death of the innocents, too young to understand why they're not supposed to play with guns, much too young to have killed a brother, a sister, or a neighbor's child. How many times in the last year have you heard on the evening news that some child was playing with his dad's gun -- or his mom's gun, for that matter -- and has accidentally killed himself or another child? It happens a lot where I live, a state where carrying a concealed weapon was approved by voters.

What do we have to do to persuade each and every person who owns a gun to keep it locked away from their children? I wish I knew. These gruesome stories occur too frequently. It keeps on happening all the time, And as people feel less safe even in their own homes, more people acquire weapons, and more children will die -- not less.

So there you have it, one woman's very personal perception of only one aspect of the gun control controversy. The course of my life and the color/flavor of my perceptions of the world have been subtly influenced by the close calls I experienced early in life. The experiences of others have only served to solidify my opinions.

Not one person in any of my close calls intended to do harm to another, yet Death was very close each time. I want to cheat Death yet again by persuading people to be more thoughtful, more careful, more responsible in how they use and store their guns. Or better yet, to get rid of them.

If you know someone who keeps a gun under the pillow, in the night stand next to the bed, or out of sight in the closet, please do them a favor and let them read this. Tell them not to just hide the gun from the kids; kids can be very resourceful when no adult is paying attention. Tell them to lock the gun in some container. Whether it's a drawer with a lock, a gun cabinet, or something else with a lock doesn't matter, just make sure the kids cannot get to it.

If you have guns and children, please take the time to review your particular situation and lock up your weapons. Do not believe that merely hiding the gun somewhere in a room while the child is absent is adequate protection. It's not. Neither is putting it up high enough to be out of your child's reach. I've seen even small children drag a chair across the room so they can reach something they want when no adult is paying attention. Make any changes that are necessary to protect your family. You will be saving the life of a child and saving yourself from a lifetime of grief, guilt, and regret.

If you have already done everything you can to be safe, Thank You!

Gun control, kids and guns, safety, NRA, women against guns

It was a hot afternoon. I was 9 years old and in a blue funk. My parents had gone to the store, and I was alone in the house. Actually I had been in my front yard talking with my two boyfriends, who lived in the neighborhood. We started arguing about something. I can't remember what it was now. All I remember is that I was ready for them to go home, and they didn't want to go. So I went into my parents' bedroom and got my father's rifle from behind the closet door, where he kept it, and went to the front door with the intention of just showing it so they would know I was serious and would move on. I stood inside the screen door and told them to go. I felt very uncomfortable. After a moment or two of discussion, they left and I put the rifle back. I have never told my parents about this incident.

Yes, I knew I was not supposed to touch the gun. Yes, I had been shown how to hold it and take it out of the case without scratching it. Yes, I had been told on more than one occasion that it was dangerous, to leave it alone.

But I was ten years old. I thought I was old enough and sensible enough to react to a new circumstance, one my parents had not covered during the warnings. I thought it was okay to do that because I had been shown how to hold it and had watched my dad use it. It never occurred to me that a ten-year-old, no matter how bright, just isn't ready to apply what they've been told to every situation and come out a winner. At ten you still have so very much to learn.

You're probably thinking that everything turned out all right, so it wasn't all that bad. But what if I'd been just a little bit angrier and had pulled the trigger as I had seen my dad do. I knew how the gun worked. I could have killed a good friend while in a temporary state of mind and been negatively affected by it the rest of my life. I can't imagine what that would feel like, but I know that I wouldn't want to experience the pain, the guilt, the anguish of killing someone, no matter whether it was accidental, intentional, or in self-defense. I wouldn't be the same person afterwards.

The next summer my family moved to Macon, Georgia, a small town 92 miles south of Atlanta. My dad had rented a house out on the edge of town. The house was near the bottom of a very steep hill, and at the bottom the street turned into a dirt road, really just two ruts in a clear place in the woods. One Sunday my neighbor Eddie, several other kids he knew, and I all set off for a walk in the woods. I knew the area close to the house, but they took me much deeper into the woods than I had ever gone before.

We walked for a long time. We passed an area that had been burned recently, probably in an effort to clear the land, although I didn't know that then. I was fascinated and alarmed by the damage to the trees and ground cover. There was smoke rising thinly here and there from small pockets of embers. I couldn't see fire or glowing coals, but I could feel some heat through the soles of my shoes as we went through the edge of it. One kid yelped as his foot started to sink into a hot pocket. After that, we were all a little more careful about where we stepped.

We moved from the relatively open area of the dirt road to the cool shade of the trees. At one point we heard the sounds of a car and people talking in the distance. Looking around for the source of it, we spotted a car through the leaves. We could just barely see three people getting out of the car and going back to the trunk, opening it, and pulling something out. They seemed to be on higher ground, close enough to tell it was a woman and two men dressed in their Sunday best. She wore a dress with a pastel flowery print, and the men wore white or beige suits and hats. But we were far enough away that we knew they couldn't see us, and we would just quietly continue on our way, away from them.

Suddenly I heard the report of a rifle and almost immediately, the crisp solid "thunk" of something hitting the tree trunk just five or six inches from my left ear. We all turned to stare in shock and terror. As the oldest and because the others were frozen with fear, I told everyone to keep low and get out of there fast. It never occurred to me, as the "big white hunter" kept firing in our direction, to yell, "Don't shoot; we're just kids." If we had not panicked, we might have had the presence of mind to shriek in mortal agony and scare the jerk to death, at least until he found out no one was hurt.

However, we were just scared kids running for our lives. Technically we were trespassing on someone else's property, and in the back of our minds we probably felt a little guilty. Perhaps that is why we reacted the way we did. I'm sure we sounded like a small herd of deer crashing through the underbrush to the guy with the rifle. He was probably just showing off his pride and joy, or perhaps eagerly trying out a new acquisition to his gun collection, too eager to wait for the shooting range to open the next day where he could fire it safely. A man's got a right to own and fire a gun out in the country, doesn't he? So what? if you shoot a few birds or squirrels or whatever.

It matters a great deal when you are the "whatever." My only regret is that he never knew what he was really shooting at.

We got away. We lived to tell the tale. But what if he had shot a child playing in the woods? The incident would have left its mark on the careless gun owner, the parents of the dead child, and the surviving children who witnessed the death. And since I was the one closest to the whizzing bullet, I can only believe that if it had hit anyone, it would have hit me.

I was a senior that year. My best friend and I had invited two fellows we were interested in to have dinner at my house, and we girls would cook. After they arrived, they were looking around while we were busy in the kitchen. We could talk easily through the room divider that stood between the kitchen and the living room, where three fish tanks sat end to end beneath some display shelves with glass doors on both sides. My dad, a pilot, had been collecting interesting trinkets from all over the world, so there was a lot to look at.

One of the boys picked up a derringer that was on the lowest shelf to admire it. Familiarity with those things had made them almost invisible to me. I had forgotten there was a derringer in there. He pointed it up at his head and made a joke about shooting himself, we laughed, and he put it down. The other fellow, my date, picked it up with even more interest because his dad was a bit of a hunter, and he wondered out loud how it would act when fired. "Any kick to it?" As he said that, he pointed it at the tall plastic kitchen garbage container with the swinging top (full of wet garbage) and pulled the trigger. Each of us was truly shocked when the darn thing went off, leaving a hole in the garbage can!

Now, we all knew my dad was out on a trip and my mom was working late and would be coming home within the hour. The guys decided they would go buy a replacement garbage can, and no adult would be the wiser. There was no reason to tell our parents since no one had actually been hurt. While our dates were gone on what turned out to be a hunting expedition for an exact replacement, my girl friend and I talked about what a close call it had been and how close we had come to causing tomorrow's front page story: "FBI agent's son killed by fellow high school student in tragic accident."

When they returned, they had what looked like an exact replacement for the damaged garbage can except for the fact that it was larger. When my mom arrived, she came into the kitchen to get something to eat, unwrapped something from the refrigerator, and tossed the plastic wrap in the garbage can. I could feel four sets of eyes watching every move, holding their breath and expecting to be discovered. I thought she looked down into the thing for a very long moment. She said nothing!

A few months later when I told my mom, all she could say was, "I thought that container looked kind of big and empty inside." I think she was too stunned to say much more. She was probably considering what effect the incident might have had on her job at the courthouse had the outcome been different.

When I think about the incident now, I can see all the things that might have happened. Any of us could have been killed, but if it had been the FBI agent's son, there would have been Big Trouble for all concerned. My date could have ended up with a criminal conviction and/or time in an institution if the gun had been pointed at a person when it discharged. We girls could have been emotionally scarred for life. We were definitely scared by "what might have been."

From the Website : Reflections on Gun Control

If this web page saves just one child, the effort will have been worth it ...