So Sophie,

My daughter wants to go live with an older female family friend for the summer. She plans to get a job and pay her own way. While I approve heartily of this plan, I worry that she'll be in over her head. How can I calm my fears without freaking her out? And, more importantly, how can I impress upon her the responsibility that she'll have to shoulder in someone else's home?

Hey mom,

ne of the hardest things for a mother to do is to watch her child go into a new situation without knowing how that child will handle it. What I would recommend doing is to talk to your daughter and make certain that she has talked things through with the family friend. If the two of them are in agreement about what the terms of the living arrangement are, then the only thing you really can do is to let her go and just hope it works out all right.

Another thing that might help you feel a lot better about the whole thing is to talk to the family friend about it. One would assume that you can do this relatively easily. Perhaps she will be able to calm your anxiety to a degree. I assume that the friend must know what she is agreeing to or she would not be offering your child a place to stay for the summer. How much older is old? If she's your age, your daughter might wind up with another mom figure for the summer and the whole thing may be short lived anyway. If the friend simply happens to be older than the daughter then things may well have a better chance of working out. Your daughter will have a voice of experience to talk to about things, while still not really going into mom territory (this also makes any counsel given much more likely to be taken into account).

Try to think about whether or not your daughter behaves in a fairly responsible and adult manner most of the time. If she does, chances are that she has a pretty decent head on her shoulders and this will be a chance for her to prove to herself that she can live in a more independent situation.

So Sophie,

How do you obtain an unregistered firearm?

Hey No reason,

t's not a good idea to start out a request for advice by lying. What do you man, "no reason"? Only someone who had a reason to want an unregistered firearm would ask a question like that. I would ask what you're planning to do with it but that's opening up a whole can of worms that I don't want to know anything about. Things like that are better left unknown.

That said, the degree of difficulty involved in obtaining an unregistered firearm depends on where you live and how unregistered you want it to be. Do you want it to never have been registered ever or are you content with its never having been registered under your name?

Getting a completely unregistered firearm involves underworld contacts and lots of money. Getting one that just isn't registered to you is far easier. All you need to do is look in rural farm papers and find some classified advertisements for firearms. Most of them are likely to be of the shotgun or rifle variety, so be prepared. If you're looking for some kind of small handgun you probably won't find it.

Anyway, once you find the right ads, just call and inquire about the availability of the gun. Be sure to ask the seller whether they bought the gun used or from a store. If they also bought it used, you're in luck. Don't tell the seller your real name. Don't give them your phone number. This is all evidence that could be linked back to you in the future and if this is the sort of gun you're looking for, odds are that you aren't going to want anyone to know who you really are.

When you show up to buy the gun, be sure to bring cash. Pay for the gun with it. You should also probably not show up to pick up the gun in your own car. But a rental would be tricky. You may have to apply some creative strategy here to come up with some unidentifiable mode of transport. At worst, you could stop before you got there and remove your license plates.