Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

This is in response to Barry Carroll’s letter of August 3.

Let me preface this by saying I am not anti-gun, I am pro-sane gun laws.

Carl Robert Brown, James Oliver Huberty, Patrick Sherrill, Colin Ferguson, Kipland Kinkle, Douglas Williams, Seung-Hui Cho, and Steven Kazmierczak. It appears these perpetrators did rely on guns to commit their deadly acts. One might conclude that if any one of these mass murderers had attempted to commit their crimes with a knife, machete or box cutter, they would not have had their moment of infamy. I posit that few people recognized this small sampling of infamous killers of just the past 30 years. Their fame was fleeting, as these rampages were only “isolated incidents.”

Your thumbnail sketch of early American history does not begin to address the nuances of gun ownership at the time. If you are looking for a real example of government intrusion into gun ownership look no farther than the fact that early gun statutes “required” ownership. That said, I’m still not convinced that if some citizens had the capacity to fire 100 rounds in the time it takes to load a musket, our forefathers may not have second-guessed the whole “right to keep and bear arms” rationale.

The only tyranny this country ever faced in relation to gun laws is the NRA’s fervent reluctance to allow even one word to go unchallenged on behalf of sane and sensible policies on the purchasing of the weapons of choice of madmen.

Again, I am not anti-gun, I am pro-sane gun policies.

And as to your final point, I believe we are all too aware now of the “prospect of one armed person in the Aurora theatre.”

Matthew Burke

Oak Bluffs