A GUN owner (Letters, March 22) asks if the thousands of gun owners should be held responsible.

In a way, we are all responsible - the non-gun lovers more than the gun-owners. Like millions of other non-gun owners, after Hungerford, I grieved and raged - and did nothing.

We sat back and allowed the politicians to fiddle around with the gun laws, when they should have banned all rifles and handguns. I don't in any way regard the responsible gun owners as criminals - merely misguided.

As for public pressure swaying politicians, that is called democracy, but I'm afraid that, once again, they succumb to the gun lobby and economics.

I do, however, think that some "accountability" should be introduced and that firearms certificates should be signed, not by policemen and/or doctors, but by pro-gun MPs.

The sustaining and perpetration of fun ownership is not a "personal" matter - it just got "personal" for teacher Miss Gwenne Mayor and the children of Dunblane.

DAVID PRATT, Plantation Street, Accrington.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.