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Things a 7-year-old boy expects Mom to put in his backpack: A peanut butter sandwich. Pencils. Maybe even a nice note with a little heart scrawled on it.

Things he doesn't: a flare gun, a .22-caliber pistol, a loaded magazine and, for good measure, 14 more bullets in a plastic bag.

But that's exactly what a second-grader had inside his Batman backpack Thursday morning when he arrived at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in Far Rockaway in Queens, Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said Friday. http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/18/us/new-york-backpack-guns/index.html?hpt
=hp_t2

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The mom, Deborah Farley, 53, told police she had been, according to Browne, "out walking the streets of Queens late Wednesday night" with the guns in her son's backpack and she forgot to take them out.

She rushed back to school after dropping him off Thursday and asked the boy what he'd done with the gun, Browne said.

When the boy told her he'd handed it over to a classmate, she finally came clean to administrators, who put the school on lockdown and called police.

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A search of the woman's home found more ammunition and seven plastic bags of marijuana, Browne said.

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I guess, really, as long as they're just shooting each other, we should kind of stand back and give a polite golf-clap...

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The first three "victims" wounded were found at a gun show in North Carolina on Saturday, when a man was trying to open the case of a 12-gauge shotgun accidentally fired it off. The people struck by the bullet were a retired sheriff's deputy and two other attendees. The shootings occurred at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show, at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh.
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In addition, it seems a long way down the road in good old Indiana, a man shot his own hand while unloading his .45-caliber semi-automatic. This took place at the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife Show in Indianapolis.

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Count me among the many gun owners who don’t think President Obama is infringing on our Second Amendment rights by proposing a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Since the terrible events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I have been thinking about guns and my grandfather. There were always guns in my grandfather’s house, and there are guns in my house.

grew up around guns. My grandfather was a hunter, and I am a hunter. Some of my fondest memories of my grandfather are of walking with him in an Iowa corn field during pheasant season, sitting next to him in a duck blind on the Missouri flyway, and the two of us watching a rising covey of quail in the northwest timber pasture.

Guns always had rules. I remember my first BB gun being taken away when I was caught pointing it at something I shouldn’t. When I was a little older, I was allowed to carry a single shot .22 rifle while I followed alongside my grandfather in the field. However, I was not allowed to carry ammunition. I had to first learn to be aware of where my gun was pointed.

“A man who doesn’t pay attention to the muzzle of his gun doesn’t pay attention to anything,” my grandfather would say. Once I was caught pointing my .22 at a barn. “The gun’s empty,” I protested when reprimanded. “Every gun-accident story I’ve ever heard involved ‘an empty gun,’ ” my grandfather would say.

My first shotgun was a semiautomatic 20 gauge. It didn’t take me long to find and remove the wooden plug in the magazine that limited the ammunition capacity to three shells. I knew the plug was required by federal law for duck hunting, but in my young mind, I reasoned, “I’m not duck hunting, what’s the point of keeping my shells in my pocket, when I can carry them in my gun?” Actors in my favorite westerns and war movies always had plenty of ammunition in their guns. Besides, I had a “real” gun now, like the men I hunted with, and I was making up for all those days carrying a gun with no shells.

The first time my grandfather watched me feed five shells into my gun, he looked at me soberly and said, “Nobody needs more than three shells. If you miss with the first two, you’re probably going to miss with the third.”

He told me the story of his Auto-5, and how its inventor, John Browning, became concerned that the gun would be banned because of its five-shot capacity. A compromise was reached to accommodate federal law: Shotguns with five shot-magazines could be used for waterfowl hunting, but that wooden plug had to be placed in the magazine to reduce the capacity to three shells.

Last month, when the shooter entered Sandy Hook Elementary School, he was not carrying a five-round Browning shotgun. He entered that school with a .223 Bushmaster rifle. This gun is designed to hold a lot of ammunition, to fire that ammunition rapidly, and to be reloaded quickly. The feature that makes this gun so lethal is its high-capacity “quick change” magazine.

The shooter’s gun had a box magazine that held 30 rounds. When empty, the entire magazine could be ejected, and another slammed into position in seconds. The only difference between this gun and a military weapon is the removal of the fully automatic functionality that allows for continuous firing as long as the trigger is held back.

Guns like the Bushmaster are designed for one thing: rapid fire, with minimal time needed to reload. It is true that the shooter could have killed children at Sandy Hook with a five-shot deer rifle and a pocketful of extra cartridges, but it would have taken him more time to shoot and more time to reload. In that time, fewer children might have died. Mr. Obama’s proposal to limit magazine capacity to 10 rounds could make a difference in a future tragedy.

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