Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pacifist who does not believe that violence solves anything. For all the years of my life, I have always been against gun ownership.

I look at young children who find their parents’ guns that should have been locked up, but left unattended, and shoot one of their siblings or one of their parents. I look at people with unruly tempers who get mad at their co-workers, family members, teachers, employers, politicians and shoot themselves, and blame the NRA for pushing gun sales so they can make a lot of money.

Homicides in this country caused by people looking for their weapon rather than having a rational discussion to resolve disputes keeps escalating, and all I see is bloodshed as a way of life for countless angry people.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger wrote: “Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the biggest scams, I repeat the word fraud, against the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen. … The true purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – stood for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee all citizens a right unlimited to any type of weapon you want. “

So why am I sitting on the fence about gun ownership now, given the opposite that I’ve always been to them?

Perhaps it is because of a dream I had when we were involved in the ISIS form of justice, that is, beheadings, shootings, torture, etc., of people who did not share their religious beliefs.

In my dream, I began to see how many people in this country were going radical and demanding that we replace our justice system with Sharia law. And then I started to see waves of immigrants coming to this country torturing, shooting and beheading our unarmed citizens who just wanted to live in peace.

When I woke up, I was distraught and visibly shocked. I could still see armed radicals breaking into homes and businesses with their weapons and our own people unable to defend themselves.

If my dreams weren’t often prophetic, I would have looked for symbolic meaning, but this was so clear that I couldn’t dismiss it as something I needed to analyze.

So here I am sitting, still sitting on the fence over gun ownership. If I could be assured that criminal background checks would be done and that parents who left their guns unattended for their young children to find would face jail sentences, I might be more willing to side with the people they love. possess weapons.

But, so far, all I’ve seen is that anyone can buy a gun and there’s no waiting period for tempers to cool down so people with unruly tempers are more likely to shoot themselves. And, so far, there are no penalties for parents who leave their guns in places where young children can find them and kill someone. And none of these concerns have anything to do with the mentally ill who are more likely to kill themselves than the lives of others.