Hours before the Orlando shooting began, I was hiding in a closet with a 911 dispatcher on the phone.

I was home alone, by which I mean with three of my younger siblings and zero parents. As a 24-year-old, I feel silly admitting that I was already a bit on edge when the first shot rang out in the darkness behind my house. A single shot; that's all I heard. Crisp and clear in the night, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My heart racing, I calmly went back inside and locked the door. Ten minutes later, I heard another. I knew that my neighbors were out of town, so it confused and slightly terrified me that the shot seemed to have come from their house. My ears burning in anticipation of another shot, I perched on the couch, listening, waiting. Only silence ensued.

As my imagination calmed down, my siblings dispersed to go to bed, and I took my younger brother to his room. We lay in bed for a few minutes, our pulses slowly but surely returning to normal. It had been quite a while since we had heard the shots, and we began to forget them altogether. And then they returned, earsplitting, bone-chilling, and much, much closer than before.

A single shot ripped through the silence, followed by several rapid ones, each barely on the heels of the explosion before it. My hands were trembling so violently that I nearly dropped my phone as I picked it up, dialing 9-1-1 as we hurried out of the bedroom and into the hall closet.

I wish I could say that the shots were a crazed killer running rampant through my neighborhood. Even a hostage situation across the street would have made me feel less ridiculous. This story would probably be much better if I had indeed witnessed something actually terrifying, but in the name of being honest, I have to admit that they were fireworks down the road. I'll never be able explain it to someone who wasn't there, but I swear they sounded like gunshots. I've shot a gun several times; I know exactly what it sounds like, and it is not easily mistaken for fireworks.

As I crouched in the closet that night, I tried desperately to convince myself that I was being paranoid. I wanted to believe that I'd seen too many movies, or watched too many episodes of Law & Order. But I just couldn't. Little did I know, as I crawled back into bed, the Orlando nightclub shooting was just beginning. The next morning, I heard the news.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 33,398 incidents of gun-related violence just this year. Of those, 231 have been mass shootings, and 8,557 deaths have resulted. 50 of the deaths and 53 of the injuries occurred at Pulse in Orlando. There have been shootings in schools, in movie theaters, in shopping malls, and on the street. They happen everywhere. We live in a world where a shooter in a neighborhood for no apparent reason is not all that far-fetched anymore.

On any other day, I would have thrown up my hands in the air and preached about how this is why people don't need guns. I would have thought about how without a gun, the Orlando shooter would not have been able to wreak havoc on those 102 people, innocent, young, beautiful people. Without guns, we would still have Christina Grimmie. I would have been full of anger and resentment for right-wing trigger-happy Republicans who value their seemingly God-given right to shoot a gun over the lives that have been taken by them.

On any other day, I would have been incapable of comprehending why anyone would feel the need to have a gun in his or her home. But as I hid, and I do mean literally hid, in my own home, in a closet, feeling more helpless than I have ever felt, responsible for the lives of three of the people I love most in this world, I suddenly understood.

Much of my disdain for guns stems from the fact that I do not believe that it is our right to decide who among us lives or dies. I have never given life to anyone, and I do not believe it is my right to take life away from someone. Life is sacred. Although my aim is accurate enough to avoid killing someone should I be forced to shoot them out of self defense, the idea that I would be holding what has always felt like a killing machine has led me to feel that civilians do not need and should not have guns in their homes.

For no other reason than to protect my family, I wished a thousand times over that night that I had a gun. I would be horribly upset if I ever shot someone, but when faced with what felt an awful lot like impending, inescapable doom, I was incredibly grateful that I had the legal right to own a gun.

How sad is it that we should feel the need to protect ourselves in our own homes? That we should live in a world where a gun under our beds or in our closets makes us feel safe. Safe from what? From each other?

There was a time when the behavior of people who drank alarmed our lawmakers so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcohol, hoping it would cure Americans of their desire to drink. Rather than induce a decline in alcohol consumption, Prohibition's later years saw an increase in consumption, accompanying an increase in illegal production and sales.

In what some would call a perfect world, we could all agree to move forward without weapons in our homes. We wouldn't have to be afraid that someone else had a gun, and thus wouldn't feel the need to have one ourselves. But that just isn't reasonable. While I do believe that there need to be greater restrictions on the types of guns people are allowed to have, and the types of people who are allowed to have them, banning all guns and taking them from the people who can safely use them is not the answer.

When you criminalize something like alcohol or guns, it does not eradicate the problem; it simply criminalizes the people who continue to possess it. Taking guns away from people would undoubtedly ensure that those with disregard for the law would keep their guns, and everyone else would be left helpless and defenseless.

The issue of gun control will always be just that: an issue. Like healthcare, there is no perfect solution. It is a problem that has become too intricate and too widespread to be resolved by something as simple as banning guns. As a nation, our needs and environments vary too greatly to be adequately assuaged by a single solution. As a grad student in Milledgeville, I don't need a gun. Not everyone is a grad student in Milledgeville. -

Despite my experience with active shooters in my neighborhood, also known as fireworks, I have decided that I will not keep guns in my home. But much like abortion or same-sex-marriage activists, I cannot imagine telling someone else that they can't have something simply because I personally do not want or need it.