A: Let me answer with a question: What would you do if you wanted to make it worse? Suppose that you were, oh, let's say The Devil, and you wanted more people to die from gunshots on the streets of Philadelphia. What would you do to make that happen?

Well, for starters, you'd make sure that there were lots more guns around. You'd get them sold in every gas station and corner store. You'd make them cheap and untraceable. If you couldn't make that legal in Philadelphia, you'd make it legal in the surrounding counties of this and other states. Then you'd encourage some free-enterprise by people buying guns out there and reselling them here.

The next thing you'd do is you'd make guns seem very sexy: sort of romantic. A Beretta would become a poor man's Boxster. You'd promote images of cool dudes carrying guns and occasionally using them to settle things with misguided, less cool people who challenged them. You might even write songs or make movies about the gun-runners who brought the little bang-BANGs to the streets. Oh, and you'd use sex to sell the idea. You'd have some hot pop-star look-alike on posters at the bus stop allowing that she really likes "a man with a nine. A Tek-Nine, that is."

I think that in one form or another, those things are already happening. There's not much that I can do, as a novelist to change the laws that make guns so easy to get. But what I can do, and what Paula Sherman can do and what you and that pop-star look alike can do is help change the dominant message about carrying a handgun.

Here's the new message: Handguns are for two kinds of people, cops and dorks. If you're carrying a gun and you're not a cop, then, well we know what you are. And we can't wait for you to get over it. That's the important message in bang BANG: real men don't play with guns and real women know that.

Gun deaths won't stop until we change the culture, so let's change the culture. Let's start now.

Q: When you wrote bang BANG, were you trying to make a political statement?

A: Not really. I wanted to talk about a woman who had been a victim and was now taking arms against a sea of troubles. I didn’t mind that I got a chance to poke fun at the gun lobbyists and the media in the process.

Q: Taking arms against a sea of troubles? So Paula Sherman is a kind of female Hamlet?

A: Maybe, but without the messy drowned-girlfriend part.

Q:It sounds like Paula is questioning the masculinity of 120,000,000 gun owners in America.

 A: No, not at all. First, she's not questioning the masculinity of  the women gun owners. Nor the hunters or the marksman. She's wondering about the men who feel that they have to have a couple of dozen guns around to feel like men and who feel that being asked to have a simple license would take away their precious bang-bangs. She wonders about the men who believe that crap so thoroughly that they're content to let a tide of illegal guns threaten the rest of us and our kids. You can't really blame her for wondering if there's a little pecker issue there.

Q: Paula gets excited by the shooting. How can you blame other people for being excited too?

 A: I don't. That's the point. There wouldn't be a problem with gun-owners in this country if shooting the damn things weren't fun. Paula knows that. There's also a point in her story where she decides to stop shooting, when she sees that she can get more accomplished without the gun.

Q: You've been a journalist, why is bang-BANG so hard on the media?

A: Actually, you don't have to be hard on the media, they do a pretty good job for you. It's not their fault really. We think of  media as responsible to the truth and in fact, they're responsible to their shareholders. That means that entertainmenttrumps information every time. Don't believe me? Well, think about this: name the five issues that you think are the most important to the welfare of the next generation. In other words, what questions are really going to matter to your kids and their kids. Got your list? Good. When was the last time you heard or read or saw a good story dealing with any of these issues?

Don't get mad at the journalists. They can't help it. The important stuff is necessarily complicated and complicated issues don't make good capsules or sound bites. Worse yet, you have to think about them. They  can be confusing and sometimes there's more than one answer. But if the fire department rescues a kitten in a tree, that's easy. You don't have to think, you can just react. That's satisfying and the media is mostly in the satisfaction business.

Incidentally, the right-wing critique of the media is spot on. What they're saying is that corporate communications doesn''t raise disturbing issues. Their definition of 'issues that ought to be raised' are different from mine, but the point is valid. Read any good stories about facing the trade deficit lately? What about the problem of an energy policy that leaves the non-OPEC countries politically independent of the oil barons? What? Not in today's paper? What a shock.

So in telling Paula's story in bang-BANG, it's hard not to imagine the media reaction. It's even harder not to see the media as central to Paula's struggle itself. It's only when Paula gets hip to the media  that her crusade really takes off.  So don't you wish that the guy in the picture up there on the left would put down the paper and look at the trees?