With all of the talk about the Second Amendment, it seems like Americans are split on the issue.

I was born and raised in Alabama, so hunting and shooting have always been a part of my life.

One of my earliest memories is going squirrel hunting with my father on the land behind our house. It is a great excuse for families to get away from the television and the shopping malls and reconnect with each other. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people who want to hunt or shoot guns for recreation.

My thought on the issue is that if we take guns away from the good guys, then only the bad guys have guns. Let’s just be honest — there is nothing we can do to keep bad people from getting guns. If we can’t keep them from drugs and other destructive devices, what makes us think that guns will be any different?

So of we take guns out of the hands of every law-abiding citizen, what do you think is going to happen to the guns? They go to every murderer, robber, dope dealer and thug, and we sit around and wonder what to do if our house gets broken into.

I don’t plan to bring a knife to a gun fight, so if you bust up in my house in the middle of the night, expect to be staring down the barrel of a .45 or whatever weapon I can get my hands on.

I’m like every other woman: I sleep with a golf club under my bed and a have a bat in the trunk of my car. But if someone were really going to come at me with the intent to harm me, I’m going straight for my pistol — and I’ll leave the club and bat for Congress to deal with.

Guns don’t kill people — people kill people. Guns are not the problem in this scenario, it’s the people behind the guns who have the problems. Whether it be a crime of passion or of hate, when people want a gun they will make a way to get it. And if the only way to get a gun is illegally, the bad guys will make that happen.

I stand behind my Second Amendment rights and I don’t intend to ever give my pistol permit away so that I can be politically correct. I actually hate political correctness, which is odd for a person in my position. But if being politically correct leaves me and my family in harms way, then forget the correctness and pass the ammo.

Now I’m not the person who is going to be decking out in camouflage every weekend and toting a gun to the grocery store, but I do believe that our forefathers fought for these rights, and I’m not about to sit back and watch them all be stripped away from us. We need to stand up for our right to bear arms. We’ve given up too many of our freedoms in this nation, and it’s about time that the average American takes a stand on an issue and stops being pushed around by every law-changer that comes down the pike.

School shootings, theater shootings, domestic violence — these things happen, and we have to guard against them. But part of being able to guard against these issues is being able to bear arms, and stand our ground against the bad guys.

I, for one, don’t care to just give away my rights.