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.