Let’s not return to the OK Corral

Jerry Bitts, Las Vegas

Sunday, July 29, 2012 | 2 a.m.

Roger Witcher’s July 25 letter, “Lessen gun control to reduce crime,” speaks of how gun ownership could have prevented the massacre in Colorado and also could bring back the respect for one another that we once had in the “Old West.”

The “Old West” to which Witcher refers must be the one in the movies. In the real Old West, there were massacres because of religion or race, and some famous shootouts were really feuds that turned into executions.

As for the Colorado incident, “Someone ... shooting back,” as Witcher puts it, would have been a disaster. The killer was wearing a bulletproof vest, and one can only imagine the chaos that would confront the police when they arrived — people firing at each other in the dark, bullets flying through walls into the popcorn stand. How could the police identify the bad guy?

Mass killings such as that which happened in Colorado have become much more frequent in the past few decades. The problem requires more thoughtful solutions than an Old West shootout.