It's tough enough being a kid when all you have to worry about is other kids.

When my son was in second grade, he was getting bullied by a couple of kids a year or two older. Rather than complaining, he found a tiny little penknife that he had bought as a souvenir at the Roy Rogers Museum in Victorville, California. The blade was less than an inch long, and he would never have stabbed anyone with it. But he thought if he showed these kids he had the knife, they would leave him alone.

I didn't find out about it until the school called to tell me my son had brought a knife to school. I didn't argue with them, although I probably could have pointed out that it was so small and the blade so dull that I probably could have swallowed it and had it pass through my entire digestive system without doing any damage. I told them I would talk to him, and he made it through the rest of his school years without taking a weapon to school.

<!--more-->He was a good kid, and very well adjusted. There were times I found myself wondering about kids who were less well adjusted, or who had parents who weren't involved in their children's lives. The year my son was in eighth grade, two misfits in Colorado went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School. Reading -- and writing -- about that was almost too much to bear.

My son is an adult now, but the shootings continue and every time a new one comes along, we become more cowardly. We allow the craziest among us -- the ones who think the government will come to get them if they don't have enough military-style weaponry -- to keep us from placing sensible restrictions on gun ownership. There's nothing in the Constitution that says we can't use licensing, registrations and background checks to make sure we can't keep criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns, but the National Rifle Association says it isn't fair to inconvenience legal gun owners.

<em>Inconvenience?</em>

[caption id="attachment_1835" align="alignright" width="300" caption="First-grade teacher Vicki Soto"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/article-vicki-soto-2-1215-web.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1835" title="article-vicki-soto-2-1215-web" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/article-vicki-soto-2-1215-web-300x210.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="210" /></a>[/caption]

Do you think the people who were killed the other day in Newtown, Conn., were<em> inconvenienced?</em>

Children -- all of them either 6 or 7 years old -- made up most of the list of people killed when another misfit loser who just happened to be able to get his hands on a semi-automatic assault rifle and kill 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He didn't have any connection with the school; he just went looking for victims -- and apparent fame.

I won't mention his name.

The only person who deserves fame from this is one of the victims. First-grade teacher Vicki Soto, a lovely 27-year-old, got her students to hide in a closet. When the shooter came to her classroom, she said her students were in the gym. He shot her dead, but then moved on and all the children in her class survived.

Where do we go from here?

Are we really so frightened of the pathetic losers who make up the NRA that we can't try to reinstate the ban on assault weapons that passed during the Clinton Administration and expired while Gee Dubya was president?

I'm really tired of the talk about how sacred the Second Amendment is.

If there is one thing the Founding Fathers never expected the Constitution to be, it's a suicide pact.

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