As I've mentioned before, I'm a reporter on a midsize daily in Massachusetts, in a town of 88,000 that's seen better days. The unemployment rate here is 14 percent.

Being a newspaper reporter, even in a city, is not a particularly dangerous job. You're around some rough people, but, statistically, construction work is more dangerous than daily journalism.

So, when word came that an armed man was supposedly wandering around the campus of the local junior college, I did not have a gun on my hip.

I'm not afraid of guns. I was hunting by the time I was 15 and I'm not a bad shot. Since I moved to an urban area, I don't own guns anymore.

I think I don't own a gun out of a sense of style. I'm a 56-year-old white man with a little extra weight on his belly. If I owned a gun, I'd probably start calling it a "weapon," and I'd call bullets "rounds" and the next thing you know I'd be wearing camouflage pants to work and going into screaming fits every time somebody said "magazine" when they meant "clip."

I'd be tiresome and fanatical and nobody would want to drink with me or walk to the coffee place with me on breaks.

At the junior college, I got out of my truck with nothing but a notebook on my hip and headed for the building where police said the gunman had been spotted. I was wearing a beautiful gray tweed sport coat with a little purple stripe in the pattern and lace up, gray suede wing tip ankle-high boots. I looked good, professional but a little colorful.

I called my boss.

"I'm walking toward the building where they said the guy with the gun was," I yelled into my phone. "Haven't seen a cop yet."

"OK," she said. "The photographer's on the way. Be careful."

"My life is in the hands of Allah," I said.

I'm not a Muslim, by the way. I just thought it was a cool thing to say and figured I'd take the protection of Allah, Jesus, Buddha — anybody who showed up.

The first cop I met told me they'd swept the building and hadn't found anything, so I went inside and talked to a few scared students. A little later, I talked to the junior college's public relations person.

I know a lot of guys who carry a gun, some of them in my business. I know a lot of guys who carry illegal guns, too. I'm a street-level reporter and sometimes make bad choices in the matter of friends.

Some of the national debate about guns centers on the Constitution. Some of it centers on how people feel. Nothing feels better than that heavy, holstered weight clipped to your belt. You're ready for anything and can say, "I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six," when you talk about how ready you are to shoot someone who is breaking into your home.

But if you really want to feel the cold wind blow, if you want to walk the wire, walk into the building without a gun, just you and Allah.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com You can buy Marc Munroe Dion's collection of columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare," on Amazon.com.