Letter: Here’s the point: Guns too easy to get hands on

Friday, May 21, 1999 | 9:26 a.m.

My letter addressed the subject of the ready availability of guns to today's youth as one of the major contributing factors of the school violence we have come to witness.

I made reference to my own youth when guns were not available to those youngsters who might be inclined to wreak havoc on society in general and schools in particular.

The part of my letter which has been most often misunderstood was when I referred to my own youth without describing the time and place. Not the '40s and '50s of the Midwest, my youth was spent in the Great Depression years of the '30s in New England.

Yes, we could order a rifle from the Sears catalog, but who had the money for that kind of purchase?

We had our misfits, the angry children who were the "outcasts" because they didn't "fit" with their peers.

Peer pressure is not a recent phenomenon. These misfits would have been the trench coat murderers of today had guns been as easily obtained as they are now.

The point of my letter was that the major difference between such children of my youth and those of today is that today's youth can easily obtain the guns that would redress their perceived injustices.

Nobody wants to return to the kind of poverty and hard times that some of us still remember, but our "progress" to conditions as they exist today has not been without a terrible price.

There are simply too many guns!

JOHN COLEMAN