From the time I was big enough to hold a gun on my own, I started shooting targets. I was about 8.

When I was 10, I took Hunters Ed and began hunting birds in the fields below my house. My yellow lab, Ginger, and I would take off and be gone for hours. Just a girl and her dog. By ourselves. With a gun. When I was 10.

At 12, I could hunt big game and I shot a non-typical antelope in one shot after my dad and I army crawled close enough to get a clear line of sight in a two-day hunt.

What's my point?

Guns are good. Guns feed families. They also provide protection and teach us lessons, like responsibility.

As Robert A Heinlein once said,“There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous men.”

When a bomb goes off, does everyone start freaking out and posting all over the Internet about how we need to get rid of bombs? No, because that sounds ridiculous.

When a bomb goes off, we blame the bomber. Not the bomb--the device that causes the destruction—instead, we rightfully blame the person who manufactures the device that causes the destruction.

Why is the gun argument any different? A PERSON shoots a gun and people think we need to get rid of guns. That's the same as saying we need to ban selling any and all products that can be used to make a bomb.

If we could educate people on warning signs and what should be a red flag, like when Dylann Roof—the man charged with the murder of the people in the Charleston Church shooting—told his friend “blacks were taking over the world” and then said “someone needed to do something about it for the white race.” We need to be able to distinguish off-hand comments from actual threats that warrant immediate intervention.

If we could spend more money on helping people who're mentally unstable so they don't pull the trigger on all the kids who bullied them at school, we could help to prevent these shootings. I know people who get bullied aren't mentally ill, but it can lead to instability or them wanting “revenge.”

As Americans, we should know banning the sale of something doesn't put an end to its distribution. Look at the prohibition. People did not stop drinking, instead it created bootlegging.

We would create a black market for gun sales. What would that mean? It would mean innocent people would have no guns for protection but criminals would still have them.

The U.S Department of Justice did a survey of the prisoners in a state prison during 2004 and their discoveries should be eye opening: “only two percent who owned a gun at the time of their offense bought it at either a gun show or flea market. About 10 percent said they purchased their gun from a retail store or pawnshop, 37 percent obtained it from family or friends, and another 40 percent obtained it from an illegal source.”

By making it illegal to own a gun, the only people it would affect are the law-abiding citizens that wouldn’t cause harm anyway. It wouldn’t stop killings because the people who want to commit a crime will find a gun and a way to do it.

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, “Every place that has banned guns has seen murder rates go up. You cannot point to one place where murder rates have fallen, whether it’s Chicago or D.C. or even island nations such as England, Jamaica, or Ireland.”

If you really think about it, it makes sense. People are going to be more cautious of committing a crime if there’s a possibility the person they are considering attacking might have a concealed weapon. Take that possibility away, and what’s stopping them?

The U.S Department of Justice said between 1993 and 2011, when gun sales increased, “gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent.”

With media having such an influence as to what we believe, a lot of reporting and coverage is one sided. The negatives of gun ownership is usually the main focus, and little is ever mentioned about all of the times shooters have been killed/detained by civilians with concealed weapons.

On December 11, 2012 a man opened fire in a busy food court in the Clackamas Town Center near Portland, Oregon. He killed two people and injured another in his rampage before Nick Meli, who was shopping in the mall, grabbed his concealed weapon. He didn’t even have to fire it; the threat was enough that the gunman ran off and killed himself before the police got to him.

If Oregon had a law prohibiting concealed weapons, who knows how many innocent lives that gunman could have taken before police arrived.

People are bad. Not guns.

If the government takes away our gun rights, it would leave us without ability to protect ourselves. Yet they can keep theirs, because they need to defend the president and everyone else.

Shouldn’t we be allowed the same opportunity? To defend our families and ourselves?

My parents weren't worried when I went off by myself for hours with a gun when I was 10 because I knew how to be careful. I knew what could hurt me. I knew where not to point the barrel and that I should always have my safety on. All the safety precautions were drilled into me BEFORE I could hold a gun.

We need to properly educate our people on gun safety so we can all own and be able to protect ourselves in the face of any danger.

If our right to bear arms is taken away… we will be at the mercy of our government to protect us, and that isn’t always the best choice. Hitler wanted to conquer a nation, so what did he do? Disarm its citizens.

My man Clint Eastwood said it best, “I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.”