Bad

Following up on the personal revelations in my cigarette post below...

I grew up in a house full of guns. Well, more like a safe full of guns: specifically, rifles and shotguns used for shooting trap and skeet and hunting deer and pheasant and other game. They were stored in a refrigerator-sized safe, the key for which was hidden someplace I still don't know. I really would have put my dad into the category of "responsible gun owner". I never saw those guns out of that safe unless they were in a leather case my dad was using to transport them to the range or wherever he was going to hunt.

That said, I don't like guns.

When I was a kid, a classmate found a loaded gun in a neighbor's house, pointed it at the neighbor's kid and fired. My classmate didn't think it was loaded. Twenty years later, I saw that classmate on the train. He looked terrified when he saw me. I knew what he was thinking: "Does she remember that I'm the one who killed our five-year-0ld neighbor?"

Last week, a friend and I went hiking in a park that's recently been known to host the occasional small black bear. I enjoyed the place and plan to go back, so when I got home I got on these internets in an effort to find out what one is supposed to do if one encounters one of these creatures (make noise to alert the bear to your presence, don't corner or make direct eye contact with the bear, back away slowly, etc.). While I'm doing this, a friend calls, and asks what I'm up to. "You need a gun," he says.

No. I do not need a gun. And neither do the vast majority of you.

And for the life of me, I wish to God that President Obama and the Congress would get past the conventional wisdom (and their terror of the bullies at the NRA) and start proposing and passing gun control legislation. Because like cigarettes, you know this stuff is killing us.