In my childhood, the presentation of a game was everything to me. I would carefully arrange my targets: the beer cans were Nazi tanks and the chalk discs were SS snipers. Then I took cover behind the sundial and allowed myself two rounds of ammunition per target and two minutes in total.

The trick was to knock out all the tanks with the opening shots in order to conserve enough fire power to hit the much smaller discs. They were devilishly tricky targets but worthwhile because they erupted in a glorious cloud of dust when hit. The cans were filled with water so they leaked when punctured. Once my father even gave me a half-empty can of spray paint which he predicted would explode delightfully when hit. I designated it “Hitler’s bunker” and punctured it with my final shot. Cleaning the paint off the garden fence was a modest price to pay.

It was 1975. I was 12 and my weapon was a 10-year-old .22 calibre air rifle. I’d earned the money to buy it by laboriously clearing surface soil from a field outside Peebles for a team of academic archeologists. My father contributed £5 for the new spring the gun needed and for my first tin of pellets.

I was intensely proud of that weapon and listened attentively while my father told me how to use it. I must never point it at any human being. I must never keep weapon and ammunition in the same place. The gun must always be locked away in a cupboard. It was not a toy and friends could not be permitted to fire it. Each time I finished using it I was to point the barrel into the air or at soft ground and pull the trigger to make absolutely certain that it was no longer loaded. It was never to be used to kill a bird or animal unless I intended to eat the victim.

I disobeyed this rule only once and shot a bird. The crow tumbled to the ground. It was critically injured but not dead. I saw its blood, vivid against the black feathers, and watched its tormented pecking at the wound before my father put it out of its misery. I felt sick to the stomach and deeply ashamed of the cruel, stupid thing I had done. The crow would disagree, but it was a lesson well learnt. I never behaved irresponsibly with the gun again.

Thirty years later, and where it is legal for him to do so, my 12-year-old son plays a similar game with an air rifle. In his imagination he is saving Private Ryan, but the rules are the same. He can usually hit the chalk discs with his first shot. That pleases me, but not as much as the way he grows up when I allow him to use the gun. It has taught him the meaning of responsibility. He follows all the rules my father set for me without a murmur of dissent, cleans the weapon and even tidies up the debris left by his mock battles.

There are other ways to inculcate awareness that we are responsible for our own actions. Projects in which young people learn to drive cars and motorbikes in a supervised environment achieve admirable results. But they require resources that few families can afford. In the right hands, air guns are an economical way of teaching responsibility. I wish adolescent school children could be instructed in their use in the same way as children of my father’s generation were taught to fire real firearms at taxpayers’ expense.

Instead a coalition of forces, ranging from the chairman of the Scottish Police Federation via the Liberal Democrats to the home secretary, is preparing to impose fresh restrictions on air weapons. The justice minister Cathy Jamieson is determined to regulate and perhaps ban them. Jack McConnell, the first minister, asserts that doing nothing about air weapons in Scotland is not an option.

This rush to promote fresh legislation is the result of Scotland’s latest moral panic. In early March two-year-old Andrew Morton died after being shot in the head with an air gun pellet. It was an abhorrent crime against an entirely innocent victim that resulted in the senseless waste of a young life. Prosecution, imprisonment and public outrage are all absolutely appropriate. So is deep sympathy for his grieving family. But to ban or restrict the ownership of air guns as a result is simply ludicrous. The same logic would suggest that the government should outlaw cars because people can be killed by them and abolish aeroplanes as they are occasionally hijacked by terrorists.

Knee-jerk legislation provoked by tragedy makes abysmal law and fails to save lives. The handgun ban imposed after the appalling murders at Dunblane primary school has done little to prevent firearms reaching the hands of criminals. An air gun ban would have still less impact. Even if restrictions were desirable, and they are not, the police have no way of knowing how many weapons are in circulation or who owns them.

A better approach would be for police and military instructors to teach young Scots how to use and respect air guns at school. Experience in Switzerland (where every household is obliged by law to possess a firearm) suggests that children who see the damage guns can inflict and learn how to use them are likely to behave sensibly. Air weapons make this possible without taking the unacceptable risk of placing firearms in widespread circulation. By training children in their use, a responsible society is able to identify those whose mental state renders them unfit to hold any type of weapon.

To the howls of fury I anticipate coming in my direction I offer this thought. No piece of machinery possesses intrinsic moral attributes. Good and evil are the consequences of human conduct. We have tried for decades to create a safe society by regulating risk and banning danger. The effort has failed. Let us consider instead the virtues of teaching responsibility.

Every responsible parent who has ever put an air rifle into the hands of an adolescent son or daughter knows that it is received with gratified awe that affords them a unique opportunity to inculcate wisdom. To those with the moral faculties to function as responsible citizens, an air gun is an opportunity, not a threat. People who lack that basic moral compass will do wrong no matter how many restrictions we impose upon the innocent pursuits of the decent, honest majority. Monstrous cretins who murder toddlers are to air guns what drunken drivers are to cars.