He knows readers aren’t pussyfooting around when they can fire off letters like these

Nothing I can write about, I have learned over the years, provokes more controversial mail than cats and guns.

Having written recently about each, I am bombarded by vigilantes from both camps.

On guns, I merely relayed a reader’s argument that a good 35mm camera is as much a precision instrument as a pistol, and that what it shoots lives through the experience.

I pointed out that I owned a 35mm camera, but not a gun, because I was afraid I’d shoot myself in the toe; and if my wife decided to shoot me, she’d either hit me in the kneecap or miss me altogether, judging by her aptitude with a camera. “Either way,” I said, “it’s a picture I can’t see myself in.”

That was published at the height of the Night Stalker paranoia.

Derald E. Martin of Joshua Tree sent me some Night Stalker clippings and advised:

“If you’re as inept with things mechanical as you at least pretend to be, then certainly you shouldn’t have a firearm where you can reach it. . . . But people like the killer mentioned in the enclosed clippings scare me, too. And I think that a few guns here and there in the hands of responsible citizens may be a good thing. . . .”

How do we know who’s going to be “responsible” in a crisis, with a loaded gun?

“My expertise with a camera is very similar to your wife’s,” writes Donna C. Aguilera, a registered nurse and clinical psychologist, of Sherman Oaks, “so I assumed that my expertise with a gun would be the same. . . . Last February I went to a lecture at a medical center in a metropolitan city in the South. Someone entered my hotel room at 3:30 a.m. (I learned later there were three.) I faked having a gun and they ran. When I returned home I purchased a Smith & Wesson .38 police special and have had instruction and practice. . . . Prior to this I have never worried nor had any problems, and the thought of owning and/or carrying a gun appalled me. . . .”

“While I enjoy using both my camera and my guns,” writes Lee Mellinger of Van Nuys, “I personally would not want to face an intruder in my home with a camera for my protection.”

An anonymous postcard says, “The technique you use to make your reputation has long been most obvious. You will begin to discuss an area or a topic with which you have little or any knowledge, and then, spend your next 10 columns trying to rationalize or, justify your lack of knowledge. It must be wonderful to be paid for ignorance. . . .”

The kind of person who writes anonymous letters is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun. An anonymous letter is in itself an admission of irresponsibility, lack of conviction, lack of courage, and lack of self-identity. (That goes for the dunce who writes me anonymous letters about my supposed errors in grammar.)

God help us if that kind of person is armed with a Smith & Wesson .38.

“I share both your appreciation of the splendid artifact a gun can be and its role in a disastrous scenario,” writes Mark Nichols. “Instead of blasting off my toe, I kill the intruder who is a kid out of work, trying to get a few dollars for medicine for his sick child. A camera is an ideal alternative to the gun as a protective device, if to the picture-taking could be added a blinding flash, an alarm, a stain, a stink and something that stuns, then with 10 toes you could dial 911. . . .”

As for cats, I merely quoted, in good humor, an article written by Penny Ward Moser for Discover magazine, in which she observed that cats think only about three things: “food, sex and nothing, and if they’re neutered, that leaves food.”

This brought a reproach from Olga S. Opfell of Torrance, who observed, “Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of.”

To which I simply responded: “The same thing might be said of women, or of any other species. How do we know what goes on in the minds of frogs? Maybe they dream of being princes.”

Now all I was doing there was writing about cats. Right? But somehow I managed to anger the third most vociferous pressure group in America (after cats and guns)--the feminists.

“As an occasional reader of yours,” writes Jennifer Richards of Long Beach, “I am uncomfortably aware of the fact that you are a comfortably staunch sexist, with all the other weaknesses that accompany such an attitude.

“However your article (today) was too grossly offensive to be shrugged off. . . . I wonder if you realize what percentage of your readers are women, and if you comprehend why one would be offended by having their mental capacity compared with that of ‘other species,’ such as cats and frogs. Just try to imagine what would have been the effect if you had made that comment about blacks rather than women!

“Sometimes I begin to wonder if there is more thought in the mind of a cat than in that of a man. Then someone makes a comment like yours and I don’t need to wonder anymore.”

I don’t know what women and cats think of, but I do know about men.

All we think about is food, sex, nothing and football.

But that clearly puts us above all the other species. None of them thinks about football.