I like guns. I don't own any, mainly because my wife feels uncomfortable with them and would prefer we don't keep any in the house. So out of respect to her, we don't have any firearms at home. But still, I would not mind starting a collection and joining a shooting club. There is something really fun about shooting, and I feel that the Second Amendment is only as strong as it is exercised.
That said, guns demand respect. I remember when I was a kid, firing a .38 Special with a hair trigger and thinking that the gun wasn't entirely under my control. It gave me a new appreciation for gun safety right then and there.
Of course, guns are 
only as dangerous as we make them and that point was hammered home to me on two subsequent occasions. Both incidents involved my brother Frank. The first was a double murder that happened mere feet in front of him. He and my dad had stopped at a Roy Rogers on the way out of Philadelphia after seeing a Flyers game, and in the next parking lot over, was a car with two teens in it. Some guy ran up and sprayed them with an Uzi, in what was later revealed to have been a drug killing. Had the shooter waved his gun an inch more to the right, he could have caught Frank with stray fire.
(Frank was the star witness on that. When he showed up to school in a suit one day, he told friends it was because he was leaving at noon to go testify in a murder trial. When his friends didn't believe him, he bet them $5 each that he was telling the truth. By day's end, he had put away a murderer and made $50 on the side. Not bad.)
The other occasion was when Frank was attending the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia. In 2002, a failed student entered the school and fatally shot both the Dean and a professor at point blank range. He killed a student on the way out of the building before he was subdued by other students. Frank was outside of the building moments before, and ran in when he heard the shots. He got there in time to watch his classmate bleed out. That image will never leave his mind.
I thought of these things while I was trying to wrap my head around the recent tragedy in Arizona, when Jared Lee Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords through the head and then opened fire on the crowd around her. I challenge anyone to read about the victims and not be moved by just how incredibly sad this all is. Consider little Christina-Taylor Green, there to meet a legislator because she might become one herself. Or Judge Roll, who was simply there to say hello to his friend Gabrielle. Or those who died using their bodies to shield their loved ones. Or those who died simply because there was not room enough to get to safety.
This incident raises a number of tough issues, namely how to prevent the Jared Lee Loughners of the world from taking innocent people with them when they self-destruct, and how to address the political reactions from this massacre. But more than anything, what happened in Arizona shows the fundamental truth that life is as precious as it is fragile. It has this way of ending when we least expect it. We can never take away the hurt of how our lives end. But we can make sure that the loved ones who survive us can do so in comfort and security, so the rest of their lives are not necessarily spent mourning the past. That's where you fine people come in. And thank God the rest of us have you, because a world without life insurance is one I'd rather not contemplate. Keep up the good work.
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