I wanted to add some additional thoughts on guns and gun control from my previous blog column. I am not a gun person as I don't own one. Owning a gun has simply never been a big issue in my life. (I do like knives and swords, which is another story.) While the idea of a lot of people running around carrying a gun has never been a comforting thought, I am fairly pragmatic about the gun issue. I think our society has such a gun culture which wields tremendous political power that to try to interpose a general gun ban is stupid and a waste of time and money and would just about cause a rebellion with a lot of violence. So I would go the other way in my approach.

You see, if I had the authority, I would rely on my interpretation of the Second Amendment as it relates to the police power of the state to regulate gun use and issuance of licenses. What really scares me about guns is the idea of people owning guns who have no earthly idea of the responsibilities of owning a gun and who have no idea of how to respect a gun and its potential for damage. I have in mind people who would go off half-cocked in a tense situation and wind up inadvertently hurting or killing other people through their own ineptness.

Therefore, I would institute licensing similar to what we do with automobiles. I would use the NRA in a partnership with government to set up training clinics for people who wished to own a gun and they would have to be able to pass a test to legally own a gun. I'm not saying they would have to be recognized as marksmen but simply that they would have to be able to use the gun competently without causing fear to innocent people around them, to clean a gun and to answer questions about acting responsible in different situations. I would also institute an age limit. I don't think children of 12 years of age should be carrying firearms. I think this would be a more rational way of dealing with the ownership of deadly firearms by the general populace.

I would also increase the penalties for those people with small children who can't seem to keep their weapons away from those children. The way I look at it, if a gun was not securely kept from a small child and the child got to it and thus eventually caused the death of another child whether accidently or not, I think those parents should lose their right to parent their other children. Such fatal carelessness should not be treated cavalierly. There is more to this subject than I can write now but that is my general feeling.

One irony I have always found amusing is that for a society such as ours which also seems to worship the Old West and our cowboys and our legendary lawmen, the reality is that we would excoriate those lawmen such as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok and Bat Masterson because they practiced what they thought was the sensible act of banning the carrying and use of guns in the towns they patrolled. The NRA would have gone absolutely crazy and those famous lawmen would no longer have been legendary. Just an amusing thought.....