I am not opposed to guns.

I am very much opposed to idiots with guns.

The difference has been thrown into sharp relief this week (again) with two horrifying fatalities. On Sunday 3-year-old Damon Holbrook of Michigan shot himself in the head with a loaded handgun he found in a closet, left there by a friend of his family. In Oklahoma, a college baseball player became the target of three teenagers who were bored, so they decided to kill somebody — specifically, Australia-native Christopher Lane, who was 22 and had offended them by running by where they were sitting.

Idiots are the reason we need gun control — not so the government can swoop in and take guns from every American, but so we can make it as hard as possible for people who are too young, irresponsible, already proven they can’t be trusted with a deadly weapon or just plain stupid, to have access to guns. And frankly, I’m surprised every responsible gun owner isn’t calling for gun laws that do this. Idiots with guns are the reason most of us fear guns. We don’t know who’s the responsible owner and who’s the itchy trigger finger looking for a reason until it’s too late.

Is that the gun’s fault? No. It’s a steaming heap of lack of common sense, selfishness, violent tendencies, lack of discipline, lack of empathy, sociopathy (Seriously, who shoots a man to relieve boredom? All is not right in that psyche.), not having enough opportunities in life, gangs, peer pressure, the seven deadly sins and about a half dozen more things. It’s when you add a gun to that sludge that we get school shooters, drive-by shootings, domestic violence shootings, road rage shootings, accidental shootings and — well, I could go on, but you get the point. I think I speak on behalf of most liberals who never want to own a gun that we’re not concerned about the large majority of gun owners. We’re concerned about the people who should not have guns and the people who think they’re responsible with their guns but who actually aren’t. Right now, the laws are not working to stop those people from getting guns, and those people are hurting others with their guns. We need to fix that.

We can start by admitting we have a problem. You can argue with Piers Morgan’s belief that America has a gun culture, but America certainly has a culture that embraces guns and the belief that personal liberty allows a person to do whatever they want. How did “Let’s go kill someone” become a response to “I’m bored?” Something broke down there. It was not the gun — but had there been no gun, Christopher Lane likely still would be alive.

Once we’ve admitted it, we need to actually do something about the problem, and I do not mean give everyone a gun a la the NRA. We need to have a real conversation about what is broken. Is it parenting? Is it lack of community involvement? Is it race relations? Do the young men who commit violent crimes with guns (because yup, they commit a huge majority of them) have a visceral anger that they can only be resolved by violence? Have they never been taught to cope? Is there no other community for them besides a gang? Society can and should step up and provide those things.

Or maybe they are just stupid kids, in which case we need laws that stop them from having guns. It’s just that simple. If you can’t teach someone to use a gun properly, he doesn’t get access to a gun.

I would like to nominate two people to lead this conversation — two people who are not in the NRA and not in Congress. The first is Antoinette Tuff, a woman who walked up to a guy with an AK-47 who was heading toward an elementary school in Georgia and started talking to him. He killed no one, despite the indications that he went to the school with a very different purpose.

The other is Damon Holbrook’s father, who posted this message to his Facebook page, according to the Monroe News. Anyone with a gun would do well to heed the lesson no father should have to learn as he did.

“I have nothing wrong with guns … I will still support the Second Amendment. All I ask is that everyone please, please safety first … lock it up and put it out of reach of anyone that has no business being around a gun, especially kids. Gun safety people! My boy would still be here if it was put away like it should have been.”

• Follow Heidi Toth on Twitter @leftinutah.