He's Got A Gun! Oh... Wait.

A woman suffering from mental illness shot her husband four times in the chest, a pistol the man kept under his mattress. The man nearly died, but survived.

A man broke into a house in the middle of the night, intent on shooting to death the parents of a wife who was suing him for divorce. The wife's brother was shot trying to stop him. The wife's father wrested the gun away and shot the intruder. Both the brother and the intruder nearly died, but they survived.

A woman was estranged from her husband because he had been cruel to her, beaten her often, in fact. She tried to kill him one night by shooting him while he slept. She fired one shot into the dark bedroom and then fled. Fortunately, she missed

A man had an argument during a weekly poker game at his home and was shot dead.

These stories aren't from the newspaper. They're from my family. Some my immediate family, some not. Guns were not prominent around our house nor the houses of relatives. There were no hunters, no one needing to bag an elk to get them through the winter.

All of these incidents involving guns always came as a surprise, especially to my uncle at that poker game.

I come by my opinion of free access to these tools of murder honestly. I'm not paid handsomely, like Republican Congressmen are, to protect and defend the right of idiots to murder children

I don't think the above stories are extraordinary. I'd bet most of you reading this have a similar tale to tell, because we're all human, we all get angry, and too many of us have guns ready at hand to "protect" ourselves.

We need to stop accepting the lie that guns protect us. They don't. There was no "good guy" in Club Q, or that Walmart, or in that place the next slaughter will soon occur. Until we stop lying to ourselves that guns protect us, stop whistling past this vast graveyard of gun victims, we're only singing another verse of "Let the bodies hit the floor."

And they will.

=Lefty=