Tuesday afternoon after our daughter picked up her children at our house and went home she called me to tell me she had a voice mail message from the superintendent of schools in our district.

Let me set the stage: We live in a bedroom community of one of the larger cities in North Carolina, even though we are across the state line in South Carolina.

The superintendent was calling all parents with children in the school district to tell them a fourth grade student had been caught with a loaded gun at his school, which is in one of the better sections of town. We have so many schools in the district that children are not bussed from one side of town to another, so this child came from a fairly well off family.

It didn’t appear the child was going to harm anyone intentionally with the gun, but to show it to some friends. Since the story would be on the news and the school wouldn’t be identified the superintendent wanted each parent to know which school was involved and to take that opportunity to talk to their children about reporting anyone to a teacher if they see a child with a gun or knife etc.

We’ve never had anything like this happen before in our town and it was a bit disconcerting, to say the least.

The child has been suspended from school, but the bigger problem is how did he or she get a loaded gun in the first place? What on earth possessed the adults in his or her home to keep a loaded gun around accessible to a fourth grader?

We have pistols and rifles in our house, but even I can’t tell you where they are. We have locks on all the firearms in the house. A few years ago my husband and I did quite a bit of target shooting at a shooting range and we also have live ammunition in our house.

The guns have a plastic-coated wire that goes into the chamber and then down through the handle of the pistol where it is then locked. The handle is the place where the bullet clip goes, so it is blocked as is the chamber for any bullet to be injected into it.

As I said, even I don’t know where we keep our pistols and my husband has his rifles hidden. But always they are unloaded while in the house and car. We unlock and load them at the shooting range.

With all the accidental and purposeful shootings going on in schools today it would seem reasonable to expect a parent or guardian to hide all weapons in the house and keep them unloaded and locked for the safety of anyone who doesn’t know how to handle a firearm.

People, if you have firearms of any type in your home, please get a lock for each of them. They don’t cost that much and can save the life of someone like your child.

An abbreviated version..one story deserving of a read and one timeless piece of music by two giants in the recording industry.

Tomorrow could not be soon enough to see every one of our troops return to American soil and removed from harms way. Nothing would make me happier than to not see another family grieve the loss of their loved one at the hands of a terrorist.

But, when the DOD presents a press release such as this, it only serves as a grim reminder why we must see not only the war in Iraq through to its conclusion but be willing to take on terrorist organizations wherever they exist:

WASHINGTON, April 16, 2008 – Use silenced guns to kill coalition forces at Iraqi security checkpoints, smuggle weapons in gradual shipments to reduce the risk of detection, and poison Iraq’s water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death.

Such tactics were fleshed out in a terrorist letter intended for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the foreign-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. But the document never reached Masri. Instead, coalition forces lifted it from the body of a terrorist they killed last month during an operation 30 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The slain terrorist and author of the 11-page missive was Abu Safyan, from Diyala, Iraq, according to military officials who made available all but two pages deemed “not releasable” on the Multinational Force Iraq Web site.

Providing a glimpse into the proposed inner workings of al-Qaida in Iraq, the author discusses the need to split jihadists into three groups: snipers, assassination experts and martyrs. Each well-trained group should have an emir, or unit commander, at the lead. Through a series of coordinated surprise attacks, groups should work in unison to “bring down the city or the area,” he wrote.

In addition to outlining extremist combat methods, Safyan advocated waging economic and psychological warfare, and his roadmap for success hinged on “continuous conflict” between Iraq’s Shiite government, Sunni members of “Awakening Movements” and Kurdish nationalists.

The balance of the read is short and included in the press release is a chart showing Al-Qaeda leaders recently captured or killed by coalition forces.

So, the ultimate question looms. If we pull out tomorrow, or next week or a year from now with the job incomplete and leave Iraq in the hands of this faceless enemy, will we not be returning at a later date to begin again the same fight?

I wish we had the answer to that question, but I do hope that whichever Presidential candidate occupies the Oval Office come January 2009, they explore all avenues carefully and not make any rash decisions.

HT:Blackfive

Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash. Each in their own right a musical superstar. Together though, they are dynamite.

I hope you enjoy as they perform Blue Yodel No. 9.