To set the record straight, I would like to respond to Jeff Chan's letter of May 3, which claimed that my Feb. 9 letter in support of gun control contained "several factual errors." Mr. Chan is mistaken. There were no factual errors in my letter. I have debated and written about gun control for 30 years, and every statement in my letter was well-documented. Aside from spouting the usual, tired NRA rhetoric, Mr. Chan essentially took issue with only one of the facts in my letter. He disputed my contention that recent studies have shown that homes with guns are three times more likely to have a shooting as those without guns. Two definitive studies on this issue have been published in recent years in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. As my letter indicated, the latest study, which investigated 1860 homicides in Tennessee, Washington and Ohio, determined that the risk of homicide in the home is three times as high in households with guns as in those without firearms. The study concluded: "Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance." Similar findings have been published by the American Journal of Public Health, World Health Organization, University of Washington and University of Chicago, as well as the FBI, which reported only 176 justifiable handgun homicides in this country in 1996, compared to 1,134 accidental handgun killings. So let's consider the facts. The fact is, unbiased, independent scientific research has consistently shown that guns kept in the home for protection are most often used to kill family members and friends, rather than to kill in self defense. The fact is, more than 30,000 people a year are killed by guns in the United States, compared to fewer than 100 per year in other civilized countries. The fact is, it is the easy access to guns that leads to tragedies like Columbine. It is the easy access to guns that results in 6-year-olds killing their classmates. It is the easy access to guns that provides the lethal mechanism for turning a simple argument into a fatality, an innocent noise in the night into the accidental killing of a child, a bout with depression into an impulsive suicide, and the paranoia of a disturbed youth into mass murder.