Cowies

I took my neighbour's dog for a walk just now. The air was so cold I pulled my Buff up over my nose, and immediately felt like a Baddie in an old Western.

In the old ones it was always very clear who was a Goodie and who was a Baddie. The Goodies had white hats and the Baddies had black ones. The Baddies also had spotted kerchiefs which they pulled up over their noses in a vain attempt at disguise. Rather like my Buff.

When I was a little girl, the boys played at Cowies (Cowboys and Indians - not at all PC). Nobody wanted to be an Indian. Well, the Cowboys were the goodies, weren't they? And the Cowboys always won.

I began to see a little more clearly what is at the heart of the gun ownership debate which is raging so fiercely in the US. The members of the NRA, and many others besides, need to have legal guns because, well, they're all Goodies, aren't they? Good Guys, they would say. Bad Guys can get guns any way, and do, but Good Guys have to go into a gun shop and do it legally. Or online or at a gun show and no questions asked. But that's OK because they are the Good Guys. They need their semi-automatic assault rifles to defend themselves, their church-going families, their well-scrubbed white children.

Of course, innocent people, women and children get killed in the cities every day, by the Bad Guys. But generally no-one pays much attention. Well, how shall we say it? They're....well, they're black kids.

But every now and then some poor, sad grazed white youth goes berserk and kills a classroom full of his own kind, and all hell breaks loose. And everyone goes out and buys another gun to defend his family.

The problem is, until this poor crazed young man went out and did this deed everyone thought he was a Good Guy. One of Us. So of course he was entitled to the legally purchased firearms he was carrying. Just like me. Until he shot my kids.

Unless we were brought up in criminal households, where wrong can be taught as right, we all think we're the good guys. But we aren't. There's no such thing. We may be guys (and gals) who try to be good, but who knows how we may be driven - by fear, mental torture, desperation, insanity - to do what the bad guys do?

So I agree. Guns should be legally sold to the good guys. Only there aren't any.