Regarding Joel Hendrickson’s recent comments (Letters, “Gun advocate’s argument full of holes,” March 9, Oklahoma Gazette):
Hendrickson lives in Oklahoma, not the United Nations. Our soldiers wear green or tan helmets and are trained to kill and/or destroy things, not wear blue helmets and spew false statistics.
Switzerland is an industrialized nation with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. It is also the law of the land that every male between 20 and 34 years of age must possess a select fire (full automatic or semiautomatic) rifle and a semiautomatic pistol until age or inability ends their obligation to serve and protect their homeland. This is an extremely heavily armed society with an extremely low violent crime rate.
Common sense can be fleeting for some, but when I walk through an apple orchard and I see a banana on the ground, my first thought is not that I am witnessing a miracle. You probably believe that guns play a role in school shootings, which also means that cameras play the same role in child pornography.
The only time I felt inadequate to a fellow human was when three of them put guns to my head and locked me in an Oklahoma City fast-food meat locker six months prior to the Sirloin Stockade massacre, something that I can assure will never happen to me again.
—B.R. Anderson
Oklahoma City
