This is Raleigh Mann.

Try to imagine how you would feel if an angry neighbor appeared at your front door with a gun tucked in his belt, or carrying a rifle. Pretty scary.

What exactly is the point of that? I think it is this. His message is clear: Don’t mess with me. I’m armed, and if you cross me, I just might be forced to use this gun. On you.

People who carry guns say they do so for their own safety and insist they are law-abiding. It’s true that those who write our laws increasingly are making it much easier for us to pack heat virtually all the time and in every place people gather, in church, mosque or temple, schools, bars and restaurants, playgrounds.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that when police searched a man’s apartment in a quiet Chapel Hill neighborhood, they found about a dozen guns of various types, including a loaded Bushmaster AR 15 semiautomatic. This particular weapon is very popular with gun enthusiasts. It looks like something military commandos carry, which is part of its appeal.

The notion of an angry person appearing at my front door carrying one of those is terrifying. But that’s the point of angrily confronting a neighbor with a gun tucked in your belt or with a rifle in your arms. To scare him or her.

Nearly every day of our lives we learn of someone’s life ending because someone got angry at them in traffic, or a child found a loaded weapon to play with. Once a bullet ends a life, we can’t get it back. That life is over. Dead forever. So many guns, so easy to kill with.

This is madness in a civilized society.

But as long as those who favor relaxed gun laws spend obscene amounts of money to fatten the wallets of our elected lawmakers, this madness will continue to dominate our lives.

Do we have the political courage to put an end to it?