Having grown up as a South Dakota farm boy, I have had a long and affectionate relationship with guns. I have dispatched rats, cottontails, jackrabbits, gophers, pheasants, raccoons, skunks, ducks, geese, deer, elk, and moose. As a rural pastor with six children, wild game became a staple at our dinner table.

The federal regulation limiting shotguns to three cartridges when hunting water fowl was never challenged by me or any other hunter to my knowledge as a violation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Considering the recent history of school and nightclub slaughter, might one step in gun restriction be to limit magazine capacity to perhaps five rounds (six with a chambered cartridge)?

If ducks and geese need protection, what about us humans? Assault rifles are the weapons of war, not of hunting. Do they need magazines of 20 or more rounds?

In my thinking, heroes are created, not at the instant of crisis, but out of contemplation of what one should do should a crisis develop. In Orlando, out of the several hundred present, if a half dozen men had rushed the shooter when he began triggering his weapons, the victims might have been counted as a dozen or so, not up to a hundred killed and wounded.

—John Olson, Kalispell