The idea of keeping a gun in the home for self protection has always puzzled me. If I understand gun safety correctly, guns should be stored unloaded in a locked cabinet, and the ammunition should be kept in a separate locked cabinet. By the time the various componants are retrieved and assembled, the bad guy has had time to do his thing.

Speaking as a liberal, I have no problems with the shotguns my rural neighbors keep to hunt deer, turkeys, etc., and have been known to seek their help when the groundhogs got too numerous in my garden. My maternal grandmother was a crack shot, and kept a rifle for shooting the rattlesnakes that would hole up in her spring house and the armadillos that uprooted her camelia bushes.

Likewise, I have no problems with the sport of target shooting. My father belonged to a pistol club as a boy in England (pre WW2), and the gun was kept at the club.

I do draw the line, however, at private ownership of AK47's and other military grade weapons whose sole purpose is to kill large numbers of people as rapidly as possible, and I'm not too keen on concealed weapons. After all, if it's concealed its not much good as a deterrant; and it can cause an innocent victim to misread a bad guy...someone openly carrying a gun is more likely to be percieved as a threat.

When I was director of an inner city museum in New Jersey, several people tried to convince me to get a gun. I declined, partly because I haven't a clue how to use one properly and would be a danger to everyone, but mainly because I felt that by the time a gun would be the appropriate response to a situtation, the situation would be way out of hand. Far better to derail it before it gets to that point.

A case in point. I had been having problems with youths misbehaving in the men's room of the museum, but I did not want to lose authority by calling the police. My solution was to bring my dog to work. The first time I had a problem after the dog's arrival, we wandered back and suggested to the boys that this was not the place for their behavior. They looked at me, they looked at my dog sitting at heel. One of them said, "Oh, shit, a Rottweiler," and they left. I never had another problem in the men's room, and the boys who had been causing trouble became friends, with the same dog as my ambassador.

It has been well documented that robbers prefer to avoid houses with noisy and/or large dogs. And I would much rather have a dog help a robber decide to go elsewhere, while I called the police; than to have to remember where I put the keys to my guns and ammunition, remember how to load said gun, and confronted the baddy myself.

(And no, my Rottweiler was not protection/attacked trained, only obedience trained; and was fabulous with the schoolkids and senior citizens who visited the museum. His sucessor is a wiz at Agility, and has just passed the test to become a registered therapy dog.)