One thing that's essential in the ongoing discussion about how to regulate guns, everyone agrees, is to hear the voices of ordinary, law-abiding gun owners. So here's columnist Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post, explaining why proposed gun restrictions won't prevent gun crime:

As much as anyone, I am eager to do whatever will make a difference. But I'm unconvinced that what is being proposed will provide the solution we seek.

Universal background checks are a perfectly good idea, except that they won't stop the burglar who recently cleaned out our house of all our legally purchased rifles and shotguns, including an antique that had belonged to my great-grandfather, who, as sheriff of Barnwell County, S.C., confiscated the gun from the triple murderer he tracked for three days and finally killed. (I want that gun back, please.)

Those guns are now in circulation among an element of society that has no intention of submitting to a background check or any other well-intentioned effort to ensure that only good guys have guns.

Oops! From criminal hands back to criminal hands, in four generations. Too bad Kathleen Parker's good intentions didn't include burglar-proofing her arsenal.

Luckily for all of us, she's no more embarrassed by that anecdote than she is by writing that Nancy Lanza "taught her son how to responsibly handle firearms." What the gun-control people don't understand, unless they listen to thoughtful gun owners, is how very, very hard guns are to control. Guns end up being shot at people in so many different ways, and there is just nothing the good guys can do to stop the bad guys, except maybe buying more guns after the bad guys take their previous batch of guns.

"Criminals will always have guns," Parker writes. Yes, they will. She's helped make sure of that.