My son Dante graduated from Montessori (pre-school) at the end of June. His teacher Mary gave us a couple of photos of him. In the first one he's dressed in his lovely, sweet graduation garb, looking like he's going to grow up to be a world-changer. In the other he's wearing a space suit and cradling a toy gun, and looks like a young Buck Rogers in the 25th century, getting ready to drive back the alien hordes! Dante has gone through a BIG love-of-guns phase over the last year or more, amassing a collection of Nerf pistols and laser guns and rifles that would probably worry even the more hardcore members of the NRA! We don't mind him playing with the guns (well, his mother, who used to work in peace-building in war-torn countries, is a bit more divided about it than me, it must be said) but I am glad we live in a country where real guns are not so readily available, or I'd be sleeping far less easily at night -- this is a budding criminal mastermind who, despite not yet being able to read, somehow managed to get onto Amazon on his Granny's tablet, order a Play Station, and get to the final payment page before she spotted what he was up to and stopped him just in the nick of time! "Locked gun cabinets?" I can hear him drawling as he picks up a paper clip and starts to unbend it. "Those sound like a challenge to me!!!!" :-)

I wrote the above paragraph a couple of weeks ago, and actually had this post scheduled to run last Sunday, along with the two photos, but I pulled it because of the gun massacres in El Paso and Ohio, and I've replaced the second photo with a statement from the El Paso county Sheriff, Richard Wiles, which you can read below. Like the Sheriff, I don't think it's enough to send prayers and best wishes at times like these. I think you have to take some sort of action, however minor and ineffective that might be.

I wish we lived in a world where a photo of a small, innocent boy with a harmless toy gun couldn't cause pain to people who have suffered the loss of friends and loved ones to big, nasty boys with very harmful real guns. In most developed countries that IS actually the case. Hopefully one day that will be the same everywhere.