Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pacifist who does not believe that violence solves anything. For all the years of my life, I have always been against the possession of weapons.

I watch little kids who find their parents’ guns that should have been locked up, but were left unattended, and shoot one of their siblings or one of their parents. I watch people who have unruly tempers get mad at their co-workers, family, teachers, employers, politicians and shoot themselves and blame the NRA for pushing gun sales so they can make a lot of money.

Homicides in this country caused by people reaching for their gun instead of having a rational discussion to resolve disputes, continues to rise, and all I see is bloodshed as a way of life for countless angry people.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger wrote: “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, against the American people by groups of special interests I’ve ever seen in my life. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the state armies, the militia, were kept for the defense of the state, whatever kind of weapon he or she wanted.”

So why am I now hesitant about owning guns, given how opposed I’ve always been to them?

Maybe it’s because of a dream I had when we got caught up in ISIS’s way of justice, ie beheadings, shootings, torture, etc., of people who didn’t share their religious beliefs.

In my dream, I began to see how many people in this country were becoming radical and demanding that we replace our justice system with Sharia law. And then I started to see waves of immigrants coming into this country torturing, shooting and beheading our unarmed citizens who just wanted to live in peace.

When I woke up, I was distraught and visibly shaken. I could still see armed radicals breaking into homes and businesses with their weapons and our own people unable to defend themselves.

If my dreams weren’t often prophetic, I would have searched for a symbolic meaning, but this was so clear I couldn’t dismiss it as something I needed to analyze.

So here I am sitting, still sitting on the fence about gun ownership. If I could guarantee myself that criminals would be background checked and that parents who left their guns unattended for their young children to find would face jail sentences, I would be more willing to side with people who want guns.

But, so far, all I’ve seen is that anyone can buy a gun and there’s no waiting period for tempers to cool down, making people with unruly tempers more likely to shoot themselves. And, so far, there are no penalties for parents who leave their guns in places where young children can find them and kill someone. And none of these concerns have anything to do with the mentally ill who are more likely to take their own lives than the lives of others.