I’m afraid of guns. A few years ago, while covering crime in the rural southwest, the local cops laughed hysterically at my reaction to an elderly woman trembling as she signed out her pistol at the station. They claim I dove under the nearest table in fear; I maintain I dropped my pencil just as she started swinging the weapon around the room trying to get it into her purse. Suffice to say, I tend to be a pretty big advocate of very tight restrictions on firearms. Today’s news highlights the problems of both extremes on the gun issue–from my “get rid of them all” stance to armed and ready second amendment buffs. First this weekend, a man accidentally shot and killed his 6-year-old daughter while cleaning his gun. Assuming he didn’t mean to fire, it seems to disprove that ‘people kill people notion’. Guns, apparently, do kill people, just not on purpose. It’s certainly possible nothing could have been done to prevent the girl’s death, but allowing guns in no way prevents us from making strict rules about things like taking safety classes (you don’t get to drive cars without passing a test first, why not guns). On the flip side, Knute Berger hashes out Mayor Nickels’ plan to ban handguns in city parks. Nickels’ proposal certainly doesn’t pass the legal sniff test; even an anti-gun nut like me can see that. And while I don’t agree having a gun will make you any safer in Belltown, disallowing weaponry in one part of town and not another seems misguided, if not downright ineffective. It seems that this is why we don’t have more carefully crafted gun laws. Something tragic happens, there’s a move to ban guns, the ban is thrown out, and we’re right back where we started.I doubt I’ll ever own a gun, but I understand our government gives us the right to them. So let’s try to remember: people with guns sometimes kill people with those guns, and that doesn’t mean we should ban guns, but let’s try to be a little safer about the whole thing. (Maybe the problem is that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.)