1. The only gun I personally own is a .22 for killing the occassional pesky raccoon or sick cat. You would be hard pressed to kill a person with it. But where I live, it just isn't that big a deal. I don't even lock the doors of my house or cars most of the time.

You are fortunate to live in an area where you feel comfortable doing that. You certainly have the right to own that gun; that has never been disputed, at least by me.

2. If I did live in an area where gang violence was a real concern, that is precisely the situation where I would want the right to carry a gun for personal protection. That just seems like common sense to me.

There are two reasons your desire to carry a weapon is foolish in an area of high gang violence, and the first is obvious: they all have guns too. By carrying a weapon, you invite violence in an area where it is YOU who will be injured or killed if violence breaks out, because no matter how you slice it your .22 isn't going to protect you from the Latin Kings in west Chicago, if you need protection from them.

The second is less obvious, but no less pertinent: police are well aware that all it takes to start a gunfight is one shot, that's why they're trained to avoid shooting at all costs. The funny thing about guns is that if you have a gun and your opponent has a gun, it really doesn't matter if you're the good guy and they're bad; you're basically evenly matched. The 'single intruder or attacker' scenario doesn't apply most of the time in a city, but the 'collateral damage and casualties' aspect of a gunfight is most salient in densely populated areas. The largest city in existence when the 2nd amendment was written had less than a million people — keep that in mind when you advocate equivalent laws for totally different situations.

3. Do you follow the news closely? Are you aware that post-Katrina, federal officials began systematically confiscating guns from law-abiding New Orleans residents? Are you aware of the lawsuits currently pending by those same residents charging that the government's actions left them defenseless and made them victims of crime?

The guns were confiscated, as I understand it, because post-Katrina (when, may I add, an incompetent conservative government abandoned hundreds of thousands of the poor to their circumstances) was anarchic. Police and National Guardsmen were being shot at and killed by criminals taking advantage of the disaster. In an effort to de-militarize the disaster area, guns were declared anathema.

Legally, these people have no standing. "State of Emergency" and "Disaster Area" confer the powers of martial law on the authorities trying to deal with the situation and remedy it. Now, were these people already in the Superdome who had their guns confiscated, I can't imagine any reasonable person thinking that carrying a gun into a room full of 100,000 people with no civic services would be a GOOD idea. The fact that crimes occured in that situation is one that FEMA and the current administration should answer for, because they happened while these people were essentially in government custody. I would write a letter to Bush and Mr. Brown if you want those crimes remunerated.