Amitai Etzioni is the author of The Spirit of Community, among other books.

Hundreds of readers took the trouble to respond to my May 16 article, "There Is No Right to Bear Arms." Their arguments deserve attention and response. Let me start with an apology. I, and my editors at IntellectualCapital.com, regret the typos and grammatical errors that found their way into the article as it was rushed to be posted. We shall do our outmost to prevent these glitches from recurring. While I am apologizing, let me also say that I wish I could respond to every one of the points made. I cannot.

A fair number of messages (to IC and my office e-mail) called me various names; among the most polite were "scum, "commie bastard" and "over-educated pompous ass." I was surprised that those who sent these messages could reach their keyboard. I had assumed that even kindergarten graduates learned that name-calling is not an argument. At least they should have learned that if you need to relieve yourself in a hurry, the pages of a Web zine called "Intellectual Capital" are hardly the proper place.

The Supreme Court ruled no individual rights existed regarding a right to bear arms

Others made numerous good points that do not directly deal with my argument, and which I shall briefly recapture here. The essence of my argument was that in all the U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning the interpretation of the Second Amendment over the past 125 years, the Court never affirmed an individual right to bear arms, or mentioned any constitutional barriers to gun-control laws. Hence, to base an argument on what Patrick Henry, George Mason, Samuel Adams or George Washington once said, or to quote from James Madison in "Federalist No. 46" or Alexander Hamilton in "Federalist No. 29," is not relevant to the issue at hand and is, thus, inadmissible. In this nation governed by laws and courts, the comments of persona, however august they are, do not override the Supreme Court

From my cold, dead hands

Still others raised practical objections. They said that "over 80 million Americans" currently own guns and hold them dear, and that, "We who love America ... are ALREADY ARMED TO THE TEETH! Who will disarm us?" Implicitly, these critics correctly assumed that I was gunning for more than clearing up a constitutional matter. But to keep the argument honest, one must admit that even if removing the guns from private hands in the United States would be completely impractical, this still would not make for a constitutionally protected individual right to own and use them.

Furthermore, I assume that if handguns and automatic firearms were outlawed, the majority of Americans would obey the law. And as has been suggested already by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), ammunition would also be outlawed and some guns would have to be bought back from their holders. But in the end, those who chose to violate the law would have to be treated like other offenders.

A few wrote to say, "You want my guns? Come and Get Em!" I assume they meant that no one would dare -- and those who did would have to wrestle with some rather tough guys. Having served in the Israeli commandos, I was briefly tempted. More seriously, let's return to this idea of mano a mano when gun control is the law, and there is a penalty for those who cannot express their machismo without a gun.

A particularly important observation that several repeated, as if they all copied it from the same NRA publication, is that Hitler made Germans first register their guns -- and then confiscated them. Some respondents claimed that if Germans kept their guns, they could have stopped this tyrant; hence, Americans should keep their muskets in case the United Nations springs on us black-booted troops jumping out of black helicopters. What a heart-warming, old-fashioned fantasy! A less naive understanding of the technologies of modern tyrants would take into account that they use heavy-duty tanks, dive bombers and long-range artillery, and cannot be much more than inconvenienced by Saturday Night Specials and other small stuff. If we are not to be overrun by a tyrant, we need well-organized and equipped armies and militias, a strong democracy and a free press -- not a bunch of Rambos thinking they are in some Hollywood movie.

In America

Finally, there were those who questioned my patriotism or American credentials. Some assumed that I "hate America, and want to see her destroyed"; others labeled me everything from a "Marxist Jew" to a "fascist/Nazi." I was informed that I "should be deported for [my] seditious propaganda."

Actually, my Americanism has taught me that at the heart of this great nation is liberty, which most certainly encompasses the right to free speech and to raise points others strongly disagree with, or find troubling or even hateful. Above all, this is not a nation of hot-under-the-collar, gun-toting, vigilantes -- but a government by the law, the highest of which is our Constitution, as interpreted by the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court has ruled that there is no such thing as an individual right to bear arms.