Editor:

You only addressed one point of my previous letter (“Where the blame should be,” Aspen Daily News, Dec. 23) in an editor’s note. Crime in Australia has increased since 1996 when gun-control measures were introduced — homicide is down by about 30 percent but assault is up by almost 50 percent. Also 39 percent of homicides are now committed with a knife and only 13 percent by firearms. So the criminals still use illegal guns.

Mexico also has strict gun control, so our government has our gun dealers supply them with guns at the expense of one of our federal agents. Thank you Fast and Furious. This is, by their definition, the fault of law abiding citizens of this country. The government’s view is we need to bend to the wishes of other countries and leave our general population defenseless against foreign and domestic threats, including our own government — which intrudes into our private lives more each day. I only wish to keep the rights our forefathers had the foresight to give us in the constitution. We all like the First Amendment because it gives us the right to say whatever we want. The Second Amendment gives us all the right to protect our family, wherever we are, and our home, wherever it is, in this great country.

The right to slaughter people with our cars is not found any place, but it is a daily fact of life, with 32,000 last year, compared to CDC figures for gun homicides of 11,493 — about one-third of car crashes. So again I state “let’s get these killers off the road.” This is an extreme point only to make a point. There are no mainstream media reports on how many lives were saved last year by the use of guns. That is a number that would be hard to calculate — but Scienceblogs makes a conservative estimate of 13,000, because in reality you can’t tell how many more deaths might be caused by a criminal that is stopped.

Americans need to keep America safe.

John Farnham
Carbondale