Please don't point that gun at my daughter

I know that kids love play guns. I know it's probably darn near impossible to keep a boy from wanting them and having them. Maybe I will deal with that someday. I choose not to have toy guns of any kind in our house and have been dismayed when my brother bought my daughter a "bubble gun."

I just don't like it. Gun owners talk about how people with guns can learn how to handle them and treat them with respect. I'm cool with that. But I don't think toy guns are a real learning tool for this lesson.

Maybe I'm just being a crazy mom, but I really don't like when kids bring their toy guns to the playground. They inevitably run around pretending to shoot people with them. Today is happened again. It seems to spark up often.

My message to my daughter is that we don't play with guns in our family and we don't point them at people or animals. Different families have other rules, but these are ours.

The last time there were kids with toy guns pretending to shoot me and my daughter at the park, I picked her up and we left. She pitched a royal fit, too. It was really ugly. But I also thought that the father allowing his boys to pretend to kill us was also pretty ugly. He barely looked up from his phone to notice the fake killing going down.

I asked the boys not to point the play guns at us, but it didn't work. I choose to leave. This took place about a week after the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy.

As we were leaving, I was struck when one boys, who was maybe about 7 years old, asked his dad why my daughter couldn't have a gun and if he was going to be killed a school. His father responded that bad things like that don't happen in nice neighborhoods like ours.

We live precisely 4.5 miles from Columbine High School and 17.4 miles from the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

I guess I beg to differ, sir.