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Every time I write something about the crazy gun culture in the United States --- even in the Mon Valley, an area that's been racked with gun violence since the 1990s --- I'm accused of being a crazy, wild-eyed liberal who wants to take away people's personal firearms.

Nevertheless, here's a story from last Wednesday's Centre Daily Times in State College:

A 45-year-old man shot himself in the hand Tuesday afternoon in the parking lot outside Wal-Mart on North Atherton Street in what police are calling an accident.

Patton Township police are not identifying the man but said he had a valid firearm carry permit.

The man had the gun in a holster and was hurrying across the parking lot to avoid holding up traffic. The firearm fell out of the holster and fell to the ground as the man was crossing the lot.

I know this Wal-Mart. It's not far from Penn State's University Park campus. That's not exactly Dodge City.

What exactly is the rationale for needing to pack heat to go grocery shopping at a Wal-Mart in State College? "The sign says 10 items or less? You know, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of forgot if I had 10 items or 11. I guess the question you need to ask yourself is, do you feel ... lucky? Well, do you, punk?"

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Yes, you can openly carry a firearm almost anywhere these days. You can pick your nose in public, too. That doesn't mean you should.

"Well, I need to defend my constitutional right to bear arms." Sure, but at Wal-Mart?

There is this argument: "Well, in this day and age, you could have a shooting anywhere, and the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." So the solution to random gun violence is to add more guns?

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One of my neighbors recently told me she carries her handgun everywhere, even on a 10-minute trip to Shop 'n Save. When she enters her little Cape Cod house, she goes through, room by room, "clearing" it.

I asked her if she thought she was paranoid. She just stared at me. My neighbor isn't a bad person. She's a nice person, but amped-up news reports and talk shows have her scared.

In my opinion, she's probably putting herself in greater danger by carrying a pistol everywhere --- the danger of accidentally discharging it, or of having someone overpower her and take her weapon. If she's that worried about someone hiding in her house, she should invest in a burglar alarm, or maybe a dog.

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Further, in my opinion, people walking around, toting firearms (yes, legally) into Wal-Mart or other public spaces to "defend their Second Amendment rights" are doing more harm to the cause of legal gun ownership than every organization that advocates handgun controls. They are making responsible gun owners look like paranoid nuts, much like far-right theocrats make all religious people look like bad by association.

If the National Rifle Association and other organizations are truly about firearms education --- as they say they are --- one of their educational messages should be, "Put it away unless you need it. You don't need to take it out in public constantly."

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So we come to the tragic case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, which was much in the news this past weekend. There are suggestions that under Florida law, the jury couldn't do anything but find Zimmerman not guilty, because Zimmerman truly believed he was acting in self-defense.

I am not a lawyer, and I was not on that jury (thank God). Maybe they're right, and the law wouldn't let them convict Zimmerman. Yet a young man is dead for no reason other than he took a short cut through the wrong neighborhood, and met a nervous man with a gun, and no one is being held criminally responsible for taking his life.

Mark Evanier, a writer who I much admire, put it like this: "I see more to be scared of from the George Zimmermans than from the Trayvon Martins."

Maybe the system worked. But if the laws in Florida are written to protect the life of George Zimmerman and not Trayvon Martin, then to quote another writer, Charles Dickens, "the law is an ass."

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What worries me is that since 2011, the self-defense law in Pennsylvania has been changed to be much like the Florida law. Not only can a case like the Martin case happen in the Pittsburgh area --- it probably will someday.

At The American Prospect, Scott Lemieux writes:

Carrying a deadly weapon in public should carry unique responsibilities. In most cases someone with a gun should not be able to escape culpability if he initiates a conflict with someone unarmed and the other party ends up getting shot and killed. Under the current law in many states, people threatened by armed people have few good options, because fighting back might create a license to kill. As the New Yorker's Amy Davidson puts it, "I still don't understand what Trayvon was supposed to do." Unless the law is changed to deal with the large number of people carrying concealed guns, there will be more tragic and unnecessary deaths of innocent people like Trayvon Martin for which nobody is legally culpable.

And to make claims of self-defense easier to bring, as Florida and more than 20 other states have done, is moving in precisely the wrong direction. And, even more importantly, no matter how self-defense laws are structured the extremely unusual American practice of allowing large number of citizens to carry concealed weapons leads to many unecessary deaths.

Among those 20 other states is Pennsylvania, which passed a so-called "Castle Doctrine law" in 2011. The law's sponsors included state Reps. George Dunbar of Penn Twp., Marc Gergely of White Oak, Bill Kortz of Dravosburg and Rick Saccone of Elizabeth. They voted for the bill's passage, along with Joe Markosek of Monroeville and Chelsa Wagner of Brookline, now the county controller. So did local state Sens. Jim Brewster, Jay Costa and Wayne Fontana also voted for the law.

I don't mean to single out our Mon-Yough legislators. The bill had bipartisan support from legislators all across the state. (Locally, Dunbar and Saccone are Republicans; the others are all Democrats.) It sailed through both houses of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and was signed by Gov. Tom Corbett.

Opposition was mostly limited to some Democrats from liberal districts, as well as those wild-eyed left-wingers at the Pennsylvania District Attorneys' Association, who called it "a defense attorney's dream."

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Here's how it's working so far: Last year, a man in Somerset County killed his wife's lover and got off the hook because he said he felt threatened.

Under the new law, said the Somerset County district attorney, "prosecutors would have had to prove the woman's husband wasn't acting in self-defense to convict him of killing Bittinger." Without any witnesses, that would be almost impossible to prove --- much as the Florida prosecutors found it difficult to make a case against Zimmerman without independent witnesses.

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The more people carrying guns, the more likely they are to use them. That would seem to be simple math, and hardly controversial. If you don't have one, you can't have an accident with one, and you can't shoot someone else by mistake.

Responsible gun ownership should mean just that --- handling a gun responsibly, and being held responsible if you wound or kill someone else without cause.

Maybe we can laugh at the guy at the State College Wal-Mart who dropped his gun and shot himself in the hand. No one will be laughing when someone in White Oak or West Mifflin --- someone like my neighbor --- is sitting on their back porch, sees a "suspicious" teen-ager like Trayvon Martin, gets scared, and shoots him dead, citing the "Castle Doctrine."

Who will be "responsible" when that happens? The person who pulled the trigger, or all of us who put the gun into their hand and encouraged them to carry it everywhere?

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