Allison Barrett Carter, bless her heart, wrote an article under the Parenting section of the Washington Post titled, “No, you can’t carry concealed weapons into our child-proofed, gun-free home“. She may be my new BFF. Totes. She’s seriously the greatest.

…and let me tell you why:

Phrases like “let me be clear”, “collectively decides”, “discussed as a community” and “collectively addressed” scream “I am a liberal! I’ve heard all I need to from my hero Shannon Watts and we know better than you, you unenlightened gun-toting heathen!!”

She began this article with “Let me be clear”.

Carter starts off by informing us how she and her crunchy husband decided early on that they didn’t want guns around their children, saying “Since I am supposed to do everything in my power to keep life-threatening risks to my kids down, I figured keeping guns away from them was a good start.”

Brilliant. So what happens if someone comes into your home with a weapon, or their sheer brute, and threatens your kids’ life? I am a mother and I do everything in my power to keep life-threatening risks to my kids down, therefore I carry a gun for their protection.

Next, Allison Barrett Carter’s imagination plays Russian roulette when she ponders, “What are the odds that one day a new friend of ours is going to come for a playdate with a gun (legally) hidden in their diaper bag?”

Um, no. Gun owners do not carelessly toss loaded weapons into their children’s diaper bags and leave them for anyone to rifle through. If I had been through her house, she would never have known I was carrying: and that’s the point. It’s called “concealed carry” for a reason and responsible gun owners know that their weapon does them no good if it’s not on them.

Carter continues her assault on personal protection with, “…what I have realized is that the burden is on me to actively ask visitors not to bring guns into my home, not on a visitor having to ask permission to bring a gun onto my property where my children are. Legal or not, trained or not, at what point does the carrier of the weapon have to secure my approval before bringing it in?”

The answer is: we don’t. Just like you don’t have to secure my approval before you volunteer as a classroom helper at our children’s bible study class, or attend a birthday party for one of your children’s classmates at Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t know what your issues are or if you’re going to snap and attack one of the children in any of those settings, but I do know that I carry in order to protect myself and my children no matter where they play with friends.

The author further be-clowns herself by saying, “…it seems the law does a great job of protecting Americans who want to have a concealed weapon; it doesn’t seem as concerned with my right to enforce my home as a gun-free zone.”

Hilarious. First of all, it seems the law is doing a great job protecting her First Amendment right to attack my Second Amendment rights, so the law is doing a great job of that today. Secondly, as she keeps pointing out, it is her “private, personal property”, not government property. She has the right to enforce her home as a “gun-free zone” by putting in a metal detector, which seems like something she would do. She needs to grow up and acknowledge that it isn’t the government’s job to child-proof homes, so to think it’s their job to gun-proof anyone’s house is ridiculous.

For her final blind stab in the dark, Ms. Allison Barrett Carter states, “Since my home is my private property, I do have some rights, of course. For example, if I discover that there is a concealed weapon in my home, I am free to threaten the carrier with trespassing charges until they leave. But even that isn’t necessarily guaranteed: it requires me to know they have a gun first of all and there seems to be some confusion about what is legally appropriate if the person still refuses to leave (not to mention they are armed and I am now in an altercation with them).”

Make it stop, shake a can of pennies at it!! Someone asking a person to leave their home is not an “altercation” and furthermore, I don’t know about your state, but in the state of Wisconsin, you cannot pull your concealed carry weapon unless there is an imminent threat of deadly harm. We don’t just go flashing our guns at the first sign of disagreement because it’s not responsible one, and two it’s illegal.

We need to continue to combat these negative ignorant stereotypes of gun-owners especially to fellow parents. I speak with my children’s’ friends and their parents frequently about gun safety, best practices, and why I choose to carry for not only my protection but also the safety of my children.

It comes down to reality: if gun free zones worked, we would never hear of school shootings, movie theater massacres or terrorist attacks in government buildings. So while you’re busy putting up your “no guns allowed” sticker on your front door, I’m armed and ready to neutralize a threat to my family. Gun free zones don’t work, but gun owners work to become trained in order to serve as willing protectors of themselves and others until law enforcement arrives.

That’s the reality of today and it’s a conversation that seems worth risking.