Prohibition won't work with guns either

It was refreshing to read the letter in the Dec. 5 edition of the Daily Herald from D. Holtz Sr. regarding gun control versus gun rights. Finally a rational voice amid all the hysteria in the discussion about guns. He cited several statistics, and among them the ratio of police officers on the street to the number of citizens they must protect. He pointed out that the actual ratio may be as little as one to 15,000 to 20,000.

This is shocking. Equally shocking is the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars Mayor Daley has spent in his relentless effort to disarm law abiding citizens. All of this while the city suffers from an acute shortage of police officers and a huge budget shortfall.

How many cops could have been hired with these millions of dollars? It's the question I have yet to hear anyone ask. How much has been spent by Mayor Daley and the city of Chicago to take this unconstitutional assault on the Second Amendment, all the way to the United States Supreme Court?

We should also not ignore the fact that wherever in the world gun laws have become stricter and more intrusive, violent crime has gone up.

We Americans have always been enamored with prohibition. Increasingly it is being applied to gun ownership. To the best of my knowledge prohibition has never worked, and it seems unlikely that efforts to prohibit guns will meet with any greater success.

Dale A. Dopkins

Hampshire