The question came up in a casual conversation. I had mentioned that I own several guns to an acquaintance, a woman. She was slightly shocked, but did her polite best to conceal it.

She looked at me speculatively as she formulated a question. I'll try to reproduce it just the way she asked it: "Do you ever . . . I mean, do the guns . . . ever influence you? I mean, do you sometimes feel like you should use them?"

She meant: Does the dark power of the guns ever creep over me? Do they call to me in the dark night of my soul? Nope. Just like the hammer on my workbench doesn't call to me at night. ("Daaa-veey, Daaa-veey, come and whack something.")

I won't bore you with numbers. It's enough to say that about half of all American households have a gun or two somewhere around the house.

This is a message of reassurance for that other half, who don't have guns in the home but who grew up knowing all about them from what they saw on TV and in the movies. I'm saying: Be not afraid. Guns do not have the power to cloud the mind.

The Minnesota Legislature is considering a concealed-carry bill. Those of you of the never-owned-a-gun, wouldn't-have-one-in-the-house persuasion will think that if the Legislature passes any new gun law, it should be one that restricts guns, for heaven's sake, not one that actually makes it legal to carry them.

Does the presence of a gun incline a person to use it? I could just tell you it doesn't, but you might believe the results of a vast experiment better. The experiment involved half a million Americans, mostly male, in their late teens and early 20s, away from home, stressed out, with plenty of alcohol and drugs around, more than half of them carrying machine guns. Sounds like Armageddon, yes?

No, sounds like American forces in Vietnam, where a majority of the troops carried M-16s. They got into fights, of course, but the fights were conducted with fists, feet, elbows, whatever -- but almost never with guns. Ask any Vietnam vet about the rarity of gunfights among the troops.

Actually, all our wars have been such experiments. But starting with World War II, though, the guns were semiautomatics -- held to be very evil guns in today's media -- moving into fully automatic assault rifles (good heavens) since the 1960s. Even in Iraq: Apart from one soldier's alleged use of a gun and hand grenades against fellow troops in the present Gulf war, there have been no reports of American troops using their guns against each other.

Even in the Old West, when everybody had shoot in' irons, gunfights were pretty goldurn rare, Hollywood notwithstanding.

I think the deep-seated feeling that when a gun is present it must inevitably be brought into play was planted in our brains by thousands of TV shows and movies we've all seen over the years. There is a dramatist's rule that dictates that The gun that is seen in Act I must be fired before the final curtain. If not, the audience is left feeling vaguely incomplete, unfulfilled, dissatisfied.

See gun. Gun go boom. Man fall down. Roll credits.

But in the real world, as that gun-familiar half of the population knows, guns don't do that to people. They emit no mind-influencing rays. They are not the devil's right hand.

There are a lot of bad guys out there carrying guns. They don't apply for carry permits, and wouldn't get them if they did. They are the ones to worry about, not the law-abiding. And no, the possession of a gun won't turn good men and women into bad guys.

Dave Matheny is a freelance illustrator and writer in the Twin Cities area.