By DUer Nancy Meyer: It's Time to Re-Examine the Second Amendment (Daily Kos)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/17/1170796/-It-s-Time-to-Re-Examine-the-Second-Amendment#comments

A year ago I was Skyping frequently with my friend Yuki in Japan preceding her long-planned extended visit to the US. On one of those calls she said, "I am so scared. My friends tell me: 'You have to be so careful in visiting the US. Everyone has guns and you could get shot.'"

I was so saddened that my friend and her compatriots had the perception that America was a gun-toting trigger-happy nation, especially since Yuki's mission here was to share the events of 1945 in her home town of Hiroshima and spread a message of nonviolence. But how could I blame them?

So as I found myself assuring her that here in rural Nebraska most gun owners are hunters, I felt a twinge of guilt, because I knew that many people here also own handguns and more. After all, just four years earlier 13 people had been shot in an Omaha shopping mall, resulting in nine deaths.

The shooter in the Von Maur store at Omaha's Westroads Malls on December 5, 2007 was Robert A. Hawkins, a teenager on medication for a history of psychiatric disorders carrying a semi-automatic rifle he had stolen from his stepfather.

FULL story at link.