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Dec. 1994, San Antonio, Windsor Park Mall. I was X-mas shopping in the mall with friends and their children and I volunteered to take their child in another direction while his parents were buying his X-mas gifts. I was not a gun owner at this time in my life and I had not heard gun fire before. I was on the lower level of the Mall close to the JCPenney entrance when I heard what sounded to me like wood boards slapping against each other hard, I knew there was some constuction going on in the mall so I thought that some boards must have fallen. Suddenly, all around me people were ducking and running and screaming. I think of it as roaches scrambling when you turn a light on at night. Then police were running and bounding over mall fixtures towards the sound, it was only then that I considered that the noise may be gun fire. I led the boy I had in tow calmly towards and through JCPenney, away from the sound, till I exited the mall. The gun fire was on the upper level of the mall at the mall entrance to Montgomery Ward, just one short mall block away. I learned later that it was teenage kids, one kid had killed another with five shots of a 22 cal. pistol and then the shooter ran through Montgomery Ward till he exited the mall. Windsor Park Mall never fully recovered from that incident and they later closed the mall permanently.

I was shocked because I grew up in that neighborhood and thought of it as safe. I was so hurt and angered that I could no longer feel that way about the place that I grew up in, shootings like that had never occurred in that neighborhood before. I look back and think it funny that this is not the event that made me a gun owner, 9/11 was, but I do wonder how many more events like this it would take to change peoples minds about gun control. I was not a gun control advocate before being a gun owner, I was just asleep to the dangers, not caring what the laws were concerning guns, always assuming that law makers were taking care of us in that way and I didn't need to know about it. Only after 9/11 did I find out otherwise. It's only after you become a gun owner for the first time that you discover the limitations the government places on your rights to defend your own life. I hope this speaks to someone.