It is good to have someone occasionally accuse me, as is done today in a letter to the editor, of having "trouble keeping facts separated from fiction and his personal wishful thinking. . ."

If only to get me thinking, wishfully or otherwise.

My assailant then expresses a little fanciful thinking of his own concerning, of course, Second Amendment issues, a pot of stew that seems to be the only political nourishment consumed by many local gun enthusiasts.

(And I’m sure this is fine with the dark forces that are actually working to take away all American citizens’ freedoms in far more important areas of real life:

Let the gun crowd focus all its energy on preserving the right to own automatic weapons and Teflon bullets, the would-be despots no doubt chuckle, while we chip away at everybody’s right to be secure in their own homes, automobiles and persons by claiming to protect them from drugs and foreign terrorists. Yeah, we’ll make wiretapping and other electronic surveillance even easier, limit appeals of those who are convicted and keep our prisons full of profitable prisoners.

Soon we’ll have new technology that will make traditional gunpowder-powered, projectile-hurling firearms about as irrelevant as slingshots anyway, so there’ll be no need to "take them away.")

At any rate, the writer suggests that my newspaper should run more articles about "the positive benefits to citizens of owning and possessing firearms and the protection from robbery, rape and other violent crimes that they provide." There are "lots" of these stories, he says, and publishing them would counterbalance my biased and irrational view concerning the destructive role they play in our society.

Had it been any other time, I would probably have just let it go. It isn’t considered good form, as I’ve pointed out before on the few occasions I’ve done so, to respond to a reader’s letter. Let him or her have the last word, is the general rule.

But I saw this missive in the "editorial page" basket waiting to be published after spending most of last week in a Utah courtroom listening to the details of a particularly shocking and gruesome handgun-related murder.

One boy dead of 19 bullets fired from two 9mm semiautomatics; two young brothers facing life sentences that, given their ages, probably means spending much of the new century behind bars; two devastated families, torn in myriad ways that can never be mended and flooded by countless tears; one town divided.

You do the math; I don’t have time. But it’ll be a while before I forget the poster-sized pictures of the frozen, bloody corpse that were displayed by the prosecution.

Meanwhile, another fatal shooting also occurred right here in Cortez last week — "the first area homicide of the new year," as we also depressingly reported.

This victim was described as "a nice man" by a former employer after he was shot full of holes, also by a 9mm semi-automatic allegedly fired by his roommate.

Apparently there was an argument that was fueled by alcohol, according to police. The gun, which was recovered from the residence after the suspect called 911 to report the shooting, was handy and oh-so-easy to use. (Squeeze, don’t jerk.)

The dead man leaves behind a family —mother, sisters, nieces and nephews — who will also be forever wounded by those fatal bullets, and I’m certain the suspect has friends and relatives who will suffer from this point on as well.

During the 10 years I’ve been reporting on crime around here, I’ve covered a number of murders that have shaken our community to its roots, vicious acts that pained me deeply just to write about, and the majority of them were committed with guns. Not with bombs, not knives, not clubs and not fists, but guns.

During that same time, more than 100,000 people have been killed with guns nationally, about twice as many Americans as were killed in Vietnam. The great majority of these shootings were crimes of passion (as opposed to those committed with premeditation or during the commission of other crimes such as robberies), and as such not the sort of deeds deterred by laws and punishment. Most were acts of otherwise responsible people made temporarily irresponsible by jealousy, rage, alcohol or other drug use, or, usually, some combination of those often fatal ingredients.

One thing I haven’t seen much of during a decade of reading police reports is people using guns as "positive benefits" to themselves or others.

I have read of incidents in which members of the local gun-owning community brandished weapons during altercations with neighbors, and made lots of threats, but few instances —none, actually —when guns have provided "protection from robbery, rape and other violent crime."

Why is this? Maybe the cops only mention the "negative" benefits of people pointing guns at one another.

Are there, in fact, dozens of robbers and rapists being driven off every year in Montezuma County and these heroic deeds just don’t make the police blotter?