I have to admit I was overwhelmed by the intellectual reach of today's opinion pages - a gentleman scolding his anthropomorphic guns and a dissertation on how individuals as part of a group led to American greatness. Professor Koppell reminded me that I have always identified with cowboys, those cheeky John Wayne heroes, riding the range, herding their long horns, shootin' up them pesky injuns and eaten' their beans round the camp fire. Nevertheless, despite my rugged individualism, my ancestors and I managed to make the effort to be part of a church and civic group, in order to build a great new society. Thank you Professor Koppell for reminding me. I now feel personally so much greater. And next time I get into my automobile or pay my mortgage I hope I will feel as "symbolically potent" as you suggested I should.

It is good to be reminded that our spirit of leadership and entrepreneurial greatness led to our inventing great things- the telephone, the atom bomb, flight, the transistor, the TV? the motor car? the computer? steam engine? Well, we improved a lot of things. We went to the moon. And then there are the Arts, writers and painters. I am sure we have great ones like Shakespeare, Picasso and Da Vinci not to mention the great movies we made like Birth of a Nation. (We even produced the great Charlie Chaplin even though he was a communist). Because of our individualism we rejected the stifling conformism and repression of community in favor of slavery, genocide, and war (12 official, lots of unofficial ones) we do things big here in America.

We respect individuals as part of a healthy community. We give everyone a chance and we have a prison population to prove it. We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. That costs money. We have over 2 million in prison, more than the Russians. This shows we care about individuals that much. We don't subjugate others. Admittedly there are more blacks and Hispanics in prison but that's because they commit more crime. What Professor Koppell forgot to mention was that Americans are the most heavily armed population in the world with twice the number of guns per head than any other country. That is greatness. Some of our guns, as your letter writer pointed out are lazy and are not doing their job. More attention must be paid in the future to rooting out lazy guns. We lead the world in so many fields, particularly in the production of carbon dioxide, which helps global warming. Our hurricanes are the biggest and our fires were until the new Brazilian President took over. Nobody pollutes like we do. As we move through the 21st century let's focus on our continued progress and greatness. Thank you for your well-articulated and accurate encapsulation of the American experiment. It made me feel proud.