Our heritage of guns and tragedy

The horror at Northern Illinois University has unleashed a torrent of mail offering solutions, with many recommending people should carry guns for their own protection.

I do not think one gun is enough; each person should have at least three guns because as you have observed in movies, when the criminal beats you to the draw, he may take your gun.

At that point, he may relax and you can drop to the ground and pull out the gun in your leg holster and while rolling over, put one between his eyes.

Should he take both those guns, you should have something up your sleeve; yeah, a derringer. Say something polite and pretend you're going to shake his hand.

Since I'm more of a protector than killer, I would use the Roy Rogers approach to a gunfight. You draw from the hip and shoot the gun out of the perpetrator's hands without hurting him.

While this is the horror story all parents and concerned citizens dread, we all must recognize there is no simple solution.

I read recently there are 10 million people with mental illness walking free on the streets of the U.S. Most of them cannot afford to get medical attention.

Every day, one or more of these incidents occur in schools, work site, and homes etc. Living is a lotto and you win only when you, family, and friends are not at one of those spots where a serious event takes place.

By the way, the same is true about terrorism. You can say that I'm a fatalist, but I think I'm an 83-year-old realist.

The NRA has a great publicist who came up with the line "guns don't kill people, people do." But a gun is innocent 99 percent of the time unless "something" activates the trigger. Then it goes bang, bang.

E. V. (Gene) Keith

Buffalo Grove