My son, while reading about presidents and worrying about assassinations, declared one day at lunch that guns should be outlawed so no one would get shot ever again.

Children are totalitarians. They see a problem and want to find a law that will make sure it never happens again.

My son's proposition presented me with an interesting dilemna. I'm not a lover of guns. I've never shot one. I'd rather not have one in my house. However, I do not oppose their possession by citizens and banning them is a foolish and misguided action.

Thus, when my son suggested that all guns should be outlawed, I asked him what it meant to be a criminal. A criminal, we concluded was some one who did not obey the laws. Would someone, I asked, who already did not obey the laws, listen to a law that banned guns. We agreed that that would be unlikely. So, who, we discussed would lose the ability to have guns? People who obey the laws and aren't hurting people with guns. We talked about how some times law abiding people with guns have been able to prevent crimes or stop criminals from hurting more people.

My son was certainly interested in the conversation and began to see that banning guns wasn't as easy as he had thought. "But," he said, "guns are dangerous." I told him that wasn't as easy as he thought to answer either. When his uncle brings his gun to our house and sticks it, locked on top of the refrigerator where no one can reach it, it isn't much more dangerous than the box of cereal we have up there. But, we also discussed how a gun, as with any other tool, like his dad's tablesaw, could be dangerous if you played around with it, didn't treat it as a serious instrument and got too comfortable and casual around it. We discussed how kids sometimes found guns, assumed they were empty and got hurt playing with them. We also talked about how, when he's older, if he has any interest in learning more about guns, he can got out with his uncle to a shooting range and learn to use one safely.

We then came back to the idea of people protecting themselves and their property from criminals by owning guns. Instead of wanting to ban guns anymore, The Boy was now concerned because we didn't own one.

I'm still not ready to go gun shopping. I'm not even ready to go to a shooting range, but I was glad I could put one authoritarian impulse from the short set to rest.