Los Angeles Daily News:

“There’s a gun here, and here and here,” 5-year-old Thomas Glover said, pointing at translucent Legos sticking out from various points of the spaceship he built in his Michigan home. “There’s even bullets!”

The words “gun” and “bullets,” are taboo in his family, but he used them enthusiastically, without any worry that he’d be punished – mostly because his mother was out of earshot.

His mother Alicia, a native of Australia, despises guns and the gun culture that surrounds her family in Rochester Hills. She lives in a suburb north of Detroit – one of the most violent cities in the United States.

Intense feelings on both sides of the gun rights debate have caused her to lose friends and question her family’s decision to live in the United States.

“Suburbia shouldn’t be a war, it should be laughter and fairy floss,” Alicia Glover said. “People [here] think that it’s OK to shoot someone.”

She and her American husband, Jeff, met in 1999 while working together at a restaurant in Australia.

When they married and moved to the U.S., shortly before Thomas was born, they made a commitment to raise their children with dual cultures – American and Australian – with the hope of one day returning to Alicia’s homeland.

In the Glover household jackets are called jumpers, diapers are called nappies and the closet is a cupboard. Jeff has even picked up a bit of an Australian accent, easily recognizable to non-family members.

They also follow another Australian tradition: no guns.

Alicia, a naturalized U.S. citizen, finds herself in a distinct minority in her adopted nation. Despite a string of recent mass killings, including the massacre of 20 students and six adults in Newtown, Conn., a year ago, fewer than 50 percent of all Americans believe that gun laws need to be tightened, according to a Gallup poll taken in October. Twenty-six percent of respondents believe private handgun ownership should be banned – a record low.

Alicia has taught Thomas and his younger brother, 4-year-old Callum, that guns are bad, guns kill and guns are not allowed in their home – not in thought, word or deed. Toy guns, real guns, water guns and even fingers pointed like guns – are all forbidden.

“It’s the thing I hate about living here,” Alicia said. “I hate that the gun culture is so strong here.”

Perhaps Alicia isn’t considering the recent home invasion in Sydney, or the attack in a cinema in Sydney just two months ago, or the recent drug related gun violence in Melbourne, or that High School students in Australia are being recruited as drug runners by international drug syndicates.

Alicia thinks that suburbia should be “laughter and fairy floss.”  Alicia doesn’t want to think about the sinfulness of man or how her vision of what Australia was like is false.  Alicia lives in a fantasy world, and the saddest part is that her husband won’t teach her the truth about the world and refuses to protect her and the children.