I am a realist.

I am sorry you learned by experience. I understand.

And, while it was good that you were able to handle the situation in which a gun posed a threat to your little girl, that also isn’t a good enough reason to not try to also strengthen the laws. It’s not an either/or choice, we can have personal responsibility backed by strong laws; the carrot and the stick work better together than either separately.

If you’d been backed up by strong gun control laws when you went to confront the other mother, you’d have been in a stronger and safer position. And there would have been a mechanism by which your distraught and possibly self-destructive friend could have had the firearm taken away. That she had it in her purse seems to me like another reason to favor gun laws as protecting people like her; it shouldn’t have been so easy.

Laws alone are not enough, but the tragic history of the last few years sure as hell demonstrates that personal responsibility alone isn’t doing the job. I’m sick of hearing about “responsible gun owners” and “good guys with guns” when the exceptions are creating a Mississippi of blood. Maybe 97% of gun owners really are responsible, but so? That minority with unlimited access to heavy weaponry is slaughtering people, and they’re just another criminal minority that needs to be reined in by law.

Conservatives prefer to counter reasonable arguments for gun control by smearing liberals as irrationally-gun-fearing wimps with no real exposure to guns (and why Open-Carry-Texas’s rationale is to “accustom” people to guns…assholes). Point of fact, I’ve had guns pointed at me more than once, and come near to injury or death from guns, including the time a shotgun held by the guy behind me on a trail went off and came within an inch or so of blowing my head off.

There was a little boy, let’s call him “Bobby” for simplicity, who at around five years old–just like those little kids in the photos!–turned a .25 Beretta in his hand around to look down the barrel in fascination at the smoke from the bullet he’d just fired, causing his dad–who we’ll call “Atilla” for simplicity–standing behind him to freak out and slap the gun from his hand and start yelling in self-evident panic.

I know damn well little kids should not be handling firearms, because I was one of them. For every gun owner who’s taken the time take safety courses and practice at a range, there are a hundred with no training and little common sense who just get a cheap thrill from firing a gun in an empty lot.

But the idea that we need to arm a subset of the citizenry with military-type weapons in order to engage the government in combat for political goals is restricted to certain ethnic groups with specific political philosophies.