I like my gun. I like using my gun, although I’ve been fortunate enough thus far to limit its use to inanimate objects. I like knowing it’s in my home. I like knowing it’s there to protect me and my kids when Hubby is gone.

I also like being a responsible gun owner. I like that almost as much as being a good parent, and really you can’t have the former without having the latter as well. Simply put: good parents don’t leave their guns where children can get them. Which is why I was shocked by the school shootings in New Orleans.

Where the hell do 15-year-old kids get AK-47s? was my first thought. And then:

And where the hell were the parents? The school officials? The metal detectors?

When kids get guns in their hands, it just gives more grist for the anti-gun crowd’s mill that’s bent on grinding our freedoms to nothing. And that makes me want to force all of them – at gun-point, if need be – to read Kim du Toit’s erudite fisk of the “guns are bad” response (or, as Kim calls them, the GFW).