A recent column suggested roadblocks to search for illegal guns.

Writer Dennis Rittenmeyer started out with a false claim. He stated, "Our worsening problem of gun violence requires creative and extraordinary action." The reality is that violent crime is going down while the rate of private gun ownership is going up.

Further, much of the driving force in increasing gun ownership is because more people are now carrying guns. And as states pass laws to make it possible for citizens to carry guns the crime rates go down faster.

Rittenmeyer is a college president who apparently holds himself to a standard of truth lower than the standard his students are held to. He proposes a solution that violates at least two of our constitutional amendments and bases the need for his solution on a false statement.

Look at violence. It largely occurs in neighborhoods were families are broken and where fathers are absent. Why not focus on the root causes and work to fix the families, to instill responsibility in boys who are becoming fathers at too young an age? Broken families and lost values are where the problem of violence began.

Where families do not exist, gangs replace the structure of the family.

I'd suggest that if Rittenmeyer turned his "thesis" into a college professor who understood gun laws and violence, he would have gotten an "F."

Bob Skurka, Lowell