Check your history books -- kids have had access to guns even before the United States became a nation. Kids have had access to semi-automatic guns for a hundred years, ever since they were invented.

I bought my first gun when I was about 12 years old, in about 1948. It is a Winchester model 1890 pump repeating .22 caliber rifle, with exposed hammer and an octagon barrel. By holding the trigger back and pushing the slide back and forth, I could fire it about as fast as if it were semi-automatic. I still have it. I paid $5.00 for it (used), and I bought it with my parents' consent. When I was a freshman in High School, I bought a 16 gauge bolt action shotgun (new), from Montgomery Wards. Again, I bought it with my parents' knowledge.

My point is that I did not carry them to school and shoot people; I didn't shoot people at all, and would not conceive of doing anything such as this. Something is wrong in our society today, but it is not guns or kids having guns. Something has changed.

Some people blame the violence on TV, and especially video games. There may be some validity to those claims, but I remember back when I was a kid, I did not have a TV. Instead I listened to the radio, to programs such as "The Lone Ranger", in which the good guy fought with and shot at the bad guys. Another favorite was "Tom Mix", in which the good guy fought with and shot at the bad guys. There was also "The Shadow", and probably some others that I have forgotten. In every program, there was violence, the good guy prevailed, and it was the good guy that was glorified. Today, the bad guy gets glorified.

At school during recess and lunch break, we played "cops and robbers" and "cowboys and indians", all of which involved play shooting. At their homes, all of my class mates had either their own guns, or access to their parent's guns. But the thing that is important here is that none of us would have ever considered harming anyone else with guns. Play-acting was not the same thing as reality, and we knew the difference. Probably the major thing which formed our lives was our respect for our parents, and that fact that our parents raised us. Going to church and learning some moral principles didn't hurt either.

Today, far too much of our society thinks that an all-caring and all-controlling Federal government is supposed to guide and mold our children. Well, it's not working. It does not "take a village", it takes parents. That is the major difference I see today, and that is what we need to look at if we want to avoid kids in school killing other kids in school.

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