I applaud your skill, agility and personal ferocity--I say quite sincerely.

If you are of the mindset that it is a good idea to bring a knife to a gunfight then by all means I readily recognize your ability to do so.

Mike,

Did you hear about the incident where a young rapper named Boonie held up a pizzaria in Oakland? He pulled a gun on the owner, whose wife and three kids were in the shop as well. The owner pulled out a 9mm and blew the guy away. A spokesman for the Oakland police had this to say:

"There is definitely a balance," said Officer Roland Holmgren, department spokesman. "This thing had potential -- who knows where the suspects were going to take the situation? But by no stretch of the imagination are we agreeing with or justifying what the owner did....We're not saying that we want citizens to go out there and arm themselves and take the law into their own hands. We want citizens to be good witnesses, to be good report-takers and to identify suspects."

What the owner did that the police are not agreeing with was defending his life and the lives of his family. How good a report-taker would the owner have been if the criminal had killed him? Maybe Boonie wouldn't have hurt anyone. But maybe he would have. He already had a rap sheet, and one of the offenses was for physical abuse of his girlfriend.

Anyway, I'm appalled at the attitude that says citizens have no right to defend themselves.

I'm so sorry to hear about your son. I hope his recovery is fast and uneventful.

~Beth

In addition to foundational mentality about self-defense and nature of threats I kind of suspect an additional layer of misunderstanding may be folded into all this: ignorance of firearms themselves. If "ignorance" can be used in its strictest definition and not seen as ad homien perjorgative.

People who lack any practical expeirence with firearms often (in my anecdotal experience) seem to attribut strange physics defying charateristics to guns, inanimat objects, that they don't possess.

Sometimes it seems like people who've never handled guns think of them as ticking bombs, like an old case of TNT sweating in jungle heat, just waiting to go BOOM without provication. Or that the slighest jolt or blunt impact is likely to cause a round in a chamber to ignite (often with unfailing accuracy). Or that it will act like the AI in 2001, just waiting to strike the unwary. The mindset is often almost superstitious, IMO only.

My wife, a mensa member, falls in this category. My arguments are hypocritical as my pistol is in a locked case at the top back of my closet at the moment due to her own fear--it is useless in the advent of an emergency.

For awhile I kept my pistol bedside during the night and up in the closet during the day. I took three procations against the accidental discharge. I never had a round waiting in the chamber. I kept the magazine out. I kept it on safe.

My 6 year old was in 113% for size last physical. He's a tall kid with big hands. Despite this it won't be another year until I feel he could jack the slide and chamber a round even if I kept a magazine in the butt-well.

Even if he knew to do so, which he doesn't.

I'm not sure the sharp little guy has a concept of red-for-dead on the Safety button so even if he managed to jack the slide without mischambering the round he wouldn't know to disengage the safey--or know to slide the magazine home though I bet he could figure that out.

Yet I feed the magazine, chamber a round and push the safety off in under 5 seconds--and I'm hardly a gunslinger. For home defense I would perfer the pistol remain with a round unchambered but the magazine in the butt. The sound of round jacking alone is a potent warning (though it pales when compared to the sound a pump action shotgun)--but making accidental discharge impossible.

I grew up rural with guns, but even more than that it was my time in the Army that convinced me that accidental discharges are a difficult process. Not because I'm some kind of he-man trained killer but because I'm clumsy.

While holding assault rifles and machine guns with chambered rounds and live saftey I have fallen down a ravine, through a window, and onto an asphalt road. Nothing to be proud of but in each case I dropped the Hot Weapon hard and it failed to go off, much less kill. This doesn't mean it can't ever happen--just that I think the "drop the gun and be killed" rationale is a little statistically hysterical.

Ocman's razor tells us that (of course) if you don't have a gun to begin with you (or your child) will never have a gun accident. Yet on a risk-reward continuum I put guns in the house above having a pool.

I don't consider myself particularly misguided or moronic for reaching this conclusion--but then I wouldn't would I ?

My premise is simply. People who've been around guns Respect them. People who are ignorant (by practical experience I stress) of guns tend to Fear them.

Read this article link about the memorial at VT. Really troubled by it. But I'm also troubled by how troubled by it I am.

On one hand it has an aspect than can be construed as healthy about it--on the other the moral equivlancy mindset that equates perpetraters to the same moral status as victims is one I think is terribly misguided and not terribly enlightened at all.

I think the girl's intentions were in the right place though my inital reaction was somewhat angry.