Like several other posters here, I grew up with guns. My father was a sportsman; when he died last summer there were perhaps 20 sporting guns to divvy up, plus some assorted others. I have, locked up, a .22 Colt Woodsman pistol, a .22 Ruger Bearcat revolver, a Browning .22 lever-action rifle, my grandmother's Iver Johnson .410 shotgun, and a German Luger that my grandfather brought home on the troop ship when he returned from WWI. Other than the last one, I'm sure none of them have been used to kill anyone. Also locked up is the Enfield bayonet my grandfather did use to kill someone, allegedly the owner of the Luger. He was barely 18 — my grandfather, I mean, although that may very well be true of the German as well. All Grandpa would ever say about it is that he'd learned he'd rather be shot than bayonetted, if he had the choice. I suspect pulling a bayonet out of a dead soldier is not a pleasant experience. For the rest of his years, my grandfather was a sober, peace-loving man.

My point is that for at least the past 92 years, despite owning what seems like quite an arsenal, no one in my family has ever shot anyone, nor, as far as I know, even menaced anyone. 

That record has held because we have never collected any of the miscellaneous other ingredients that, when added to the mix, dramatically increased the potential for accidents, violence and death.

Guns + mind-altering substances

Guns + mental illness

Guns + extreme stress 

Guns + fear

Guns + hopelessness

Guns + hatred 

In my family — and I have to say that this goes for all the families of my acquaintance, which, granted, is not a random sample — outside of war  (you know, that "militia" thing), no one has ever seen a gun as a solution to anything.

Therefore, I can empathize with those who say that guns aren't the problem. I just think they're wrong, because the math works the other way too. Start with any of those other elements and add a gun, and the result is the same.

Last Saturday, I happened to be reading a novel in which a character said that Americans have had guns for more than 200 years; they've had television for 60, and gun deaths are now far more prevalent, per capita, than they were in 1950. Identify the variable, she challenged.

I would add, identify the group to which that variable belongs: outside influences on personal boundaries. My parents might have listened to Tom Mix on the radio, but they certainly weren't exposed to the level of violence that is now so prevalent in entertainment media. Neither were my siblings and I, because television stations did not come to our part of the world until we were teens and by then we'd learned to entertain ourselves in other ways. And neither were our children, really, because we wanted to control the relative amounts of influence that family, peers, school and "pop culture" had on their lives. Laugh if you want, but it worked.

TV is not unique; we now have several more easily accessed sources of influence, and the people and corporations who want to own our opinions are very adept at taking advantage of them. That all adds up to a lot more opportunity for those other factors to creep into our lives. We're bombarded with the suggestion that someone is out to get us and we have to protect ourselves. We're steeped in the belief that we deserve to have everything we want but "they" don't want us to have it. We're surrounded by people who have taken that to heart, and that climate has turned guns into a far greater threat than they once were (or than they still are in most of the rural towns of the West).

Guns rarely kill people on their own. (It happens; I attended a funeral for a kid who found a gun in a field, where it might have rested for 50 years. His dad soaked it in a bucket of solvent, and when the kid reached into pull it out, it discharged. Still, if someone had shown responsibility in not leaving the gun where the kid could have picked it up ....) Most of the time, guns kill people because people see guns as the easiest or the only way out of a situation they think they need out of. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. All that matters is that they believe it.

Very few of them developed that idea on their own; instead, it's been suggested to them over, and over, and over, until it no longer seems remarkable, until aiming a weapon at someone seems only logical. "What else," they demand to know, "would you have me do?"

We would have had you avoid that situation in the first place. We would have had you seek help before it got so bad. We would have preferred that you took your loss and walked away, because after all, it was a small loss compared to someone's life. We wanted you to solve the problem calmly and peacefully.

Too often, though, they lack the ability to do that. They've been robbed of the skills by those factors in the equations above, and by the constant murmur of the culture with which they've chosen to associate, possibly without ever realizing they had a choice not to. 

Here is what I would ask of Congress: Summon up some political courage and do the right thing.

Failing that — and it will fail —  here is what I would say to the gun lobby: No more lies. There is a constant in every one of those equations. Admit it. Help deal with it. Don't fudge on the other math either; we know that every year, every day, guns harm more people than they protect. Consider the math in Jared Loughner's case: one man, one gun, a pile of bodies. Don't give me that bullshit about "if only someone had been armed." Four unarmed people disarmed Jared Loughner. Don't pretend that civilization would fall apart if we weren't all armed; you can't convince me because I have 92 years of family history without a single shot in self defense. Deal with the truth: Guns render each of those other problems far more deadly. Restricting them would save people.

If you don't want people like me "threatening" your precious 2nd Amendment rights, deal with the problems honestly. Then maybe we can talk. Until then, don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. I do, and it disagrees with what you're saying.