I wish to respond to Mr. Heck’s letter “Work together” and his claims that restricting access to firearms would take us one step closer to preventing tragedies like Littleton.

In the beginning, Mr. Heck seems to be saying that gun control would have limited these young men to a fistfight instead of the tragedy that occurred.

I’m sorry, but if the 20,000 gun control laws currently in place in this country on the federal, state and local level couldn’t prevent this, I doubt a few more would have helped.

These two planned out this massacre for over a year. To say they would have used only fists is to put on blinders to the true problems.

Mr. Heck also states that the only people who could have stopped them from lashing out is themselves.

While I believe in personal responsibility, over a one-year period you would think the parents, teachers and other students would have had plenty of chances to stop this. Mr. Heck also says that if knives had been used instead of guns ” … our imaginary attackers would be able to kill at most a few people …” I wonder if that would be any consolation to the parents of the “few people.”

Mr. Heck states that America gave these young men guns. America did no such thing.

Do you say that America gave the drunk driver a car when he kills a family in another car? I doubt it.

And to state that the sole purpose of manufacturing a gun is for it to kill is to be totally ignorant about guns and the many purposes they serve people through out this country.

Mr. Heck then defies the notion of firearms being used for personal safety and states that they create more criminals than they have turned away.

No matter how much time I’ve spent around firearms, not a single gun has tried to convince me to go into a life of crime. Maybe I’m one of the lucky few.

According to Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University, firearms have been used to scare off attackers 1.5 million times a year, and Professor Kleck was a staunch defender of gun control before he started his study.

These young men were in violation of many “gun control” laws that are already in place, but that did not stop them. Our country’s moral fabric is such that these two men didn’t see anything wrong with the slaughter of their classmates.

I agree that we need to crack down on black-market guns, but I disagree with him on the imposing of more gun-control laws.

There are a few prominent leaders of other countries who would agree about the need for gun control: Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and, our favorite mass murderer of all time, Adolph Hitler.

I believe my safety is in MY ability to defend myself, not the government’s.

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Andrew R. Mohror

Sophomore

Animal ecology