Sometimes, my local paper's "wake up calls" make waking up in the morning a disturbing experience.

Actually, this morning's column by the Philadelphia Inquirer's John Grogan serves as more than a wake up call; it's taking me down a very unpleasant memory lane. As Mr. Grogan sees it, it is "time to unload" on what he calls "gun stupidity":

I know I will hear from the gun nuts and firepower freaks, and they will scream the same old bellicose rant. I'm tired of hearing it.

I'm tired of standing over coffins. Of seeing schoolchildren caught in the crossfire and little boys killing playmates. Of teenage pet-sitters found with bullet holes in their heads.

This state has a problem its political leaders are happy to ignore. Now, that problem has come home to roost, right at the doorstep of a gun-supporting lawmaker. How many more wake-up calls will it take?

A boy and a gun

[Sen. Bob Regola (R., Westmoreland)] had left a key to the house with a 14-year-old neighbor boy who was pet-sitting. According to police, the boy found Regola's unsecured 9mm pistol. The boy's body was found the next morning in a woods behind the house, a single gunshot wound to the head, the gun beside him.

Investigators still have not determined whether the death was an accident, suicide or homicide, a state police spokesman said yesterday. District Attorney John Peck has said Regola will not likely face criminal charges.

This much is certain: Another child found another gun. And the drumbeat of senseless loss goes on, resonating across the American landscape.

Regola, a member of the National Rifle Association, surely is asking himself painful questions in the aftermath of the death. What if he had kept the gun in a locked case? What if he had secured it with a trigger lock? What if he had removed it from the house for the weekend, knowing an unsupervised teenager would be there?

What if the father of three simply had decided a home with children is no place for lethal weapons?

Perhaps Louis A.J. Farrell would be alive today instead of a statistic.

Is the right to bear arms really worth this price? The price of our children's blood? Blood on the streets of North Philadelphia? Blood in the woods behind the home of a respected member of the legislature?

Someone tell me, please, what right are we protecting? The right to bear unbearable grief? What freedom? The freedom to place ourselves and our loved ones in needless peril?

I also think it's also a bit callused to be so quick to blame the gun when there's an ongoing investigation of the death -- the facts of which seem a bit strange (to me, at least). Let's start with the gun, because it is being blamed as the culprit. The reason State Senator Regola is not being charged is because it was not stored haphazardly:

District Attorney John Peck said at this point no criminal charges would be filed against the senator. He noted that although Regola's pistol was not safe-guarded by a trigger lock, it was not stored haphazardly.

"It was not left out in an area where anyone would see it," he said.

And what? I can't reconstruct what might have happened from these facts, but here's what's being reported by police:

The Farrells became concerned early Saturday when they realized Louis was not in his bedroom and apparently had not slept in his bed, [State police Capt.] Cole said.

"The family came to the conclusion, after they could not locate him in the house, he might have been out all night. In a frantic search, the father first went to (Regola's) house and then went into the woods where he discovered him ... about 100 yards behind the house," Cole said.

Louis Farrell was last seen in the house at about 10:15 p.m. Friday by his older brother, Jeffrey, who thought his brother was heading to bed, authorities said.

Cole said Regola's oldest son, Rob Regola IV, did not accompany his family to Harrisburg, where the senator received the Legislator of the Year Award from the Pennsylvania Sheriff's Association. Cole said the 16-year-old arrived home at about 10:30 p.m. Friday and stayed there through Saturday morning.

According to a search warrant affidavit filed by investigators, Rob Regola IV, a student in the Hempfield Area School District, spoke by telephone with Louis Farrell at about 11:30 p.m. Friday.

Troopers confiscated computer equipment from the Regola home to retrieve possible e-mail messages exchanged between the two youths, who were friends.

Was human agency involved, or did this gun manage to find its way out of a drawer or cabinet and find its way into the woods with the dead teen? I strongly suspect human agency of some sort.

So why blame the gun?

If the kid (or kids) had gotten hold of the keys to the family car and driven it into a tree, would anyone be blaming SUVs?

Maybe I'm getting too old. Maybe I should return to my adolescence, and another tragedy involving a gun, and a best friend. It haunts me to this day, and the story is absolutely true except I won't use his real name. I'll just call him "Mark" (the name of another loved one, whose death was caused not by a gunshot but from AIDS). Hope that's OK with everyone.

I had known Mark since kindergarten, and it is no exaggeration to say he was one of my few truly best friends. ("Best friends" is my term for the closest few -- people I can count on one hand.) He was a lot more intelligent that I. At least he seemed that way; his penetrating insights into the nature of things went far, far beyond any of his peers, and his writing was brilliant. Everyone thought he was the Ernest Hemingway of our class. We were very close. (Spin that any way you want; I won't.) I helped drive him to the ER after a drug overdose which would have been fatal according to the docs who pumped his stomach out. He was extremely pissed off that I went out to California and intended to remain there, and said so in repeated letters to me. But we both got through our freshman year, and by June of 1973, I was really looking forward to seeing him. Unfortunately, there was an extremely unpleasant telephone conversation between him and my then, um, "inamorato" which I was not told about until the latter's deathbed confession accompanied by a plea that I forgive him. (If only I had known in 1973! But there are some things in life you're just fated never to know, and I was lucky that no "Gone with the Wind" Dr. Meade was there to stop such deathbed confessions.)

I didn't know it when I got on the plane in June of 1973, but at that point "Mark" was already dead. He had often discussed suicide (in a casual, sneering manner, as if to show he wasn't afraid), and like I say, there'd been the drug overdose which today we'd call an "early warning," but what happened was, simply, that between the telephone conversation I found out about many years later and my getting on that plane, he had gotten hold of his father's revolver and put a bullet through his head.

While it wasn't logical, I blamed myself. I excoriated myself. Why wasn't I there earlier? Why didn't I call him at the right time? (His morbid sense of humor was such that had I interrupted him even as he was about to pull the trigger, he'd have told me what he was about to do, we'd have both laughed it off and gotten rip-roaring drunk, and in all honesty he might never have done it.) I went into a depression that lasted nearly a year. No one cared, because everyone I knew was busy partying and screwing. They thought I was neurotic (which of course I was).

Over the years I finally learned -- really learned -- that the actions of other people can't be blamed on anyone except the people who take them. Especially a suicide. No one is responsible for someone else's suicide, and it is unfair to say that they are. I'm including even the apparently very "guilty" party who died of AIDS, and who (it turned out) told Mark that I didn't like him any more and had said that I hoped I never saw him again -- which was a complete lie, driven by insane jealousy. Even he was not responsible. The reason, of course, is that people say mean and nasty things all the time, and the normal response is not to commit suicide, but to get upset, maybe ask questions, maybe find new friends, and maybe just be hurt.

Looking back, I am shocked that no one (no one I can remember, at least) ever thought to blame the gun. That would have seemed just too convenient.

And it would have been too convenient. Mark could just as easily have taken another drug overdose. He could have wrapped his car around a tree.

Seriously, what is it about the guns? I'm trying, I'm really trying, to be fair to Mr. Grogan, and I'm trying to avoid the "same old bellicose rant." (God knows I've ranted bellicosely enough times.) Why are guns to blame when humans use them for purposes we don't like?

In my haste to blame myself for what happened to Mark, I never thought to blame guns. Perhaps this was because I always had access to guns (as, of course, did Mark). My father gave me two guns as gifts, and at any time I could have put a bullet through my head, through a friend's head, or through an enemy's head. Maybe it was because I had access to drugs and cars, and bridges and buildings and railroad tracks (I guess there was plenty of rope too -- and even water), but guns just seemed like one among many ways to end it all, if you were so inclined.

Anyway, this argument is old. Some people kill themselves. Some people kill other people. The rest of us will all die of one cause or another. (As I've said many times, I've lost dozens to AIDS, but I think it would be a cop-out to blame syringes or penises for their deaths.)

My "wake up call" came in 1973, and I'm still wide awake.