While I don't live in West Seattle any longer, I was born and raised here. Occasionally I return because it is a place that I love.

When I was in West Seattle last week, I read your Nov. 7 issue. On the editorial page, I found a political cartoon showing a crazed, tattooed, scarred, gap-toothed, armed-to-the-teeth white man running through a neighborhood wildly firing handguns while a child cowers in his/her house and observes that he/she is watching a one-man "well regulated militia." Obviously, this little cartoon is meant to attack the second amendment to the Constitution by using a white male lunatic acting extremely dangerously as an illustration of typical gun owners who endanger society as we know it.

Needles to say, a lunatic acting dangerously needs to be stopped immediately, but that has nothing to do with militias per se. But with the power of the pen, I call on you to be accountable for your actions.

My father was a good and accomplished man. He was also a hunter. Right here in West Seattle and in the field, my father taught me how to handle guns responsibly and safely. My father didn't have a tattoo, missing teeth or a demented mind, but he was a white man who owned guns. Your cartoon insults his memory. It also insults me.

Need I point out that men with guns, most of them white, fought for your right to slander them? Many of them died in that effort. Only two days ago, some of us honored their memory. Did you?

I presume that your editorial leanings are to the left, though I would be pleased if they were in the political center. Liberals often speak of rights and fairness (bur rarely of responsibility). Given this emphasis on rights, I find it intellectually curious that you would attack the constitutionally mandated rights of others. From a logical standpoint, it would seem that you would fall upon your pen defending the rights of all citizens.

But, perhaps like many lawyers, you only want to deal in shades of gray, as in "the rights that I value are more important than the rights you value." But in the interest of fairness (there is that word again) and intellectual honesty, I suggest that since you are attacking one element of the Bill of Rights, you ought to attack them all. Consistency is a wonderful thing.

Along that line, why not attack the separation of church and state? You could run a cartoon with a crazed preacher running down the neighborhood streets throwing Bibles at helpless children and screaming, "Repent your sins or go to Hell."

Or, how about attacking your presumably favorite right, freedom of speech? You could draw a lunatic editor/cartoonist bounding the streets of West Seattle, madly firing newspapers at cowering pre-schoolers and yelling, "I have all the answers! Read and vote accordingly!"

It could be great fun for you and open up a whole range of editorial possibilities that you may never have considered. Your staff could be kept busy for years.

Lastly, as every eighth grader should know especially since James Madison was the principal drafter, the Bill of Rights was set up for the protection of individuals from the state. An armed citizenry capable to being formed into a militia was seen as a necessary counterbalance to a federal army. The right of religious freedom was to protect religion from the state, not the state from the religion. And the right of free speech was aimed at countering egregious behavior by governments at any level, especially the violation of the individual rights of citizens.

You should know that and act accordingly.

R. D. Riedasch

Anacortes