There doesn't seem to be anything good about guns, right? In households with guns, people are more likely to commit suicide. Most families who own guns don't store them safely, the journal Pediatrics reports. Kids who have taken a gun-safety class will pick up a real gun planted in a toy box and handle it as unsafely as children who haven't taken the class, according to a report in the Journal of Behavioral and Developmental Practices. And the drive-by shootings. And the 7-year-old who just shot his 8-year-old cousin. And the psycho at Virginia Tech. And on and on.

So. There is really nothing good about guns. Then why do I want to learn to shoot? And why is it so important to me that my sons, both in their early teens, learn how to handle and shoot guns? It's not that I want to have a gun around for self-defense. With my luck, the gun will end up in the perpetrator's hands.

Is this a unique form of American schizophrenia? I am terrified that gun violence will affect my loved ones, and yet I am determined to learn to handle and shoot firearms. To use another term borrowed from psychology, maybe it's approach-avoidance. That means being drawn to the very thing you're scared of.

But it's more than that. And though this statement may get me kicked off these pages and land me squarely in the Fox News camp, I think guns are cool. The act of aiming at and hitting a target way over there seems hard and somehow worthwhile. Shooting offers the improbable odds of golf with a whole lot more noise and potential destruction.

My position might come as a surprise to all the parents I've quizzed, over the years, about gun ownership and storage when discussing play dates. In a country where a third to a half of households have guns - most of them stored with ammunition or where children can easily access them - it's not a bad idea to ask whether people have guns and how they're stored.

Most parents said they don't have any firearms or they have hunting rifles locked up away from the ammunition. Though some parents probably took my question as a ringing confirmation that I'm even more neurotic than I appear, I don't care. One mother's answer made it all worth it.

"Oh, I hate guns, too," she said, adding that her husband collects them. So great is her disgust for guns, however, she said by way of reassuring me, she doesn't even know where they are in the house.

"My boys, on the other hand," she added, laughing. "They are so clever! They know where the guns and the ammo are kept." That's when I politely invited them to come play at our house.

"Will you give them snack?" she said. "Please, no artificial coloring, sugar, or fat."

No one knows better than my kids that, once again, mommy dearest is probably full of hot air. I have not produced the promised target lessons, nor have I taken them to check out a shooting range. They're not mollified by a recent gift of a BB gun rifle - knocking soda cans off a picnic table with an unsatisfying "tink" isn't their idea of the manly fun they could be having with guns.

And that's what may be holding me back. What is their idea of the manly fun they could be having with guns? I see them playing first-person shooters, causing blood and limbs to explode across desolate war zones. I see them flying around the yard pumping up their water soakers, attacking their friends and each other. But I have no sense of what this means. Is it akin to when they were toddlers and they rolled around fighting like kittens? Or is it a grown up - and decidedly less cute - version of that, a primal desire to attack and kill?

Or can it be that my sons harbor a psychopathic bloodlust that could land them - once they become fluent in firearms - on the growing roster of school shooters? There I'd be, The Bad Mother, careworn and stringy-haired, peering through greasy curtains at the clot of angry reporters on my lawn.

I am probably blowing things out of proportion. I mean, how would I even know if they are just being boys or are preparing for their own Armageddon? I'm a woman (estrogen) with a pacifist upbringing (wuss) who sees firearms in the context of noble pursuits (BOring) like the biathlon, an Olympic sport combining skiing with marksmanship (zzzzz).

Happily, I can report that my sons don't exhibit classic serial killer traits - the animal torture, the swastika-festooned websites, the chewing with their mouths open. (Uh-oh.) But they have exhibited classic traits of having a mother who's promised them shooting lessons for years. And they haven't been immune to that other current running through our family - my continued fear that they or their friends will get hold of a real loaded gun and act like boneheads with it.