BEFORE I get beaten to death with rolled up copies of the Evening Press, I want to make a last stand.

It's not a topic for the squeamish. It is a topic that has people apoplectic with rage either for or against. And after a most frightful row with colleagues, I know the two sides will never agree to differ. It's all about a four-letter word - guns.

See, you are bristling with indignant righteousness already. Reasonable people suddenly lose all reason at the very mention of the word.

Our story on Saturday about owners of gas-powered air guns facing jail if they do not apply for a firearms certificate - even though many of them are grossly under-powered - had the reaction of splitting opinion in the office.

I'm already in deep water with readers after last week's cruel column in which I described how I plucked and 'dressed' a pheasant which was already dead when it came into my possession. So I might as well say it: I don't see any harm in guns. The harm is in the finger that pulls the trigger.

Thousands of gun users have never hurt a fly. Well, perhaps they have swatted a mosquito which has bitten them on the neck while they were taking aim.

But in the right hands for the right reason, guns have a legitimate reason to exist. Of course they can be dangerous if used by criminals or the criminally irresponsible. So can cars, and knives and hammers and baseball bats and spanners and pint glasses in the pub on a Saturday night.

Most shotgun owners have never harmed anything but a clay pigeon. Many rifle users have committed grievous bodily harm on nothing more than a paper target.

But guns are made for killing and maiming, say the fervent anti brigade. They have no other purpose. So let's just ban them and all will be well.

Farmers legitimately and legally use guns for pest control on their land. Rifle and pistol clubs thrive under strictly-controlled conditions. Weapons of a certain power have to be licensed and everyone who applies for a licence is carefully vetted, and must keep their guns in locked, burglar-proof cupboards.

I know many senior police officers, judges and an ex-Lord Mayor of York who are keen rifle enthusiasts. They are not killers.

So what about archery? Bows, particularly crossbows, are lethal weapons. Yet they are used in target sport by thousands of men, women and children every day. The javelin was originally a weapon of war - a spear - but is now reserved for the sports field. It is an Olympic sport, like rifle shooting, and throwing the hammer or the discus.

I would never for a moment approve of the American constitutional right to bear arms. I'm all for short sleeves in summer but the thought of people walking round with a loaded pistol in a holster under their armpit - or tucked in their car's glove compartment alongside their ice scraper and torch - is repulsive and most definitely dangerous.

We don't want their lingering Wild West culture over here, we've outgrown that over the centuries. And Britain is, rightly, already subjected to tighter gun laws than most other countries throughout Europe.

But you just cannot ban everything that is dangerous in this nanny state of ours. Otherwise we would be banning bricks and bleach, electricity and gas, cars and lorries, cigarettes and alcohol, needles and ropes, ice and snow, swimming and mountain climbing, chainsaws and ladders - and we'd all be walking around with buttons instead of zips (have you ever trapped your finger in a zip? Ouch).

But, you may say, all these things have other uses and weren't created just to kill.

In my day we were brought up on westerns and knights-in-armour movies. We spent days "shooting" each other with our toy guns and kicking make-believe stirrups into imaginary horses. The hours we'd spend in sword fights with home-made wooden swords and shields painted up with the crest of the Black Knight.

While we were doing that, our parents were busy teaching us the difference between right and wrong. It did not create a generation of killers. We never hurt anyone in real life.

Nowadays, though, many parents will not even allow their children to play with toy guns because they fear such games encourage aggression and violence. Sadly, in the human species, aggression will find its way out, weapon or no weapon.

That's my ten penn'orth, for what it's worth. Just don't shoot the messenger.

Updated: 11:53 Tuesday, March 02, 2004