Re "Reading the news": One of the most annoying features of our modern, range-of-the-moment, media-driven culture is the inflation of words. Like currency, which loses value when too much of it is printed, overused words become meaningless.

I quickly became tired of the Virginia Tech coverage when the words "hero" and "heroic" started to be bandied about ad nauseam about the survivors of the shooting. At the cost of sounding callous and unsympathetic, I say that most of those who avoided getting killed were simply lucky enough not to be in the most direct line of fire of the kook who went on the murderous rampage.

Heroes - recognized or not - are those who do something extraordinary to save others or improve the lot of others. Heroes were the 9/11 firemen. Heroes are the men and women serving in Iraq. Heroes are the good teachers in our schools who demand excellence from their students, and do so for a pay that is a tiny fraction of what gangsta rappers make.

If I have any sympathy for the Virginia Tech survivors, it's because I see them as victims of that loathsome atmosphere of political correctness pervading our campuses. It was political correctness which prevented follow-ups on the warnings and premonitions of teachers, fellow students, and judges about this madman, all the more so because he was a "minority." God forbid!

It was political correctness that prevented anyone from carrying a gun on that campus. Who knows? Someone could have put a bullet through this guy's head before he killed 32 people. But then, of course, we would have heard all about the use of "excessive force." Oh, no!

And it's political correctness, that makes Ms. Towler muddle the issue between drunk-driving and gun-control laws. When a drunkard gets behind the wheel of a car, he imperils other people, and, yes, you are right in saying that laws are not going to prevent him from doing it. But those laws are NOT an infringement on his rights, because he's infringing upon the rights of other people by driving in an impaired state.

Whose rights am I infringing upon when I lawfully carry a gun? And why do you think it's "bizarre" to suggest that campus guards and students carry guns? Why do you think that so many of these shooting-gallery massacres have taken place on college campuses and high school grounds? Has it crossed your mind that it was precisely because the shooter knew for sure no one was going to shoot back?

Like all issues cherished by liberals - be they global warming, embryonic stem cell research, or eminent domain - the avowed goal is a smokescreen for the real goal: In the case of guns, while claiming to want to protect people, what you really want is more government control and intrusion.

Italo G. Savella, FernwoodPark, Rochester

Mary Anna Towler's response: You want to let college students wander around campus toting guns? Cho Seung-Hui shouldn't have been able to buy a gun. And it would be dangerous to let college students - a fair number of whom are known to drink to excess on occasion - carry guns on campus. Or would it be only the "responsible" students who would go to class and to frat parties armed?

I call your attention to Adam Gopnik's commentary in The New Yorker, which includes a discussion of the effect of gun-control laws in other countries. "[T]here is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil," Gopnik writes. "There is an American particularity about guns."

In general, he writes, countries with strong gun-control laws have less gun violence; those with weak gun-control laws have plenty of it.