I’m fine with you owning one, but if you do, or own a permit for one, or are licensed to carry one:

I think you need to be as rigorously tested about your knowledge of guns and gun laws as anyone who gets a driver’s license is about laws regarding driving a car.

I think you need to be as insured for gun ownership as any auto driver is required to be against accidents, withbenefits payable to the victim(s) of any crime or accident that occurs with any gun registered to you.

I think you should store your guns unloaded and locked up securely. A glass display case with a decorative key-lock is not secure. (If you don’t own a gun, you should lock up your prescription medicine the same way.)

I know this will not stop violent gun crime, but if you own and carry, you owe it to the people who do not to be as responsible as you can be about your right, to help keep stolen and illegal weapons out of the hands of violent criminals, and to prevent accidents due to loaded and unsecured weapons.

Now for the shock:

I don’t think this ought to be law.

It ought to be the recognized, self-enforced responsibility of every gun-owner to observe these suggestions as the natural course of living in society while owning a gun.

Guns don’t kill people, but people with guns do kill people.

The plain fact is, when disturbed and angry people set out to kill a lot of other people, they don’t generally reach for a baseball bat or a knife or set about the complicated process of securing the materials and building a bomb. There are exceptions, and history is full of them, and the news takes note of them because they are the exceptions.

I don’t know what the breakeven number of murders is to classify a crime as “mass murder,” but we have tended to become numbed to news stories of three, four ,five, six and even more people being shot to death as just a part of life to flinch at but not remember.

We’re saddened when we read a tiny news story buried back in the paper — or an obituary — about a child who was killed by finding a loaded gun in the house and playing with it.

But we don’t take note of it or remember it in the same way that we do when stories of multiple killings are broadcast over and over again on the news and splashed on the front page of the newspaper.

If you own one gun or many, please:

Do what you can to keep guns out of easy access to people who want to kill people — or who don’t know how to use them.