In her Op-Ed piece “It is time to replace the Second Amendment,” Linda Wojciechowski argues that “It’s time to recognize that in 1791, when that Constitutional amendment was passed into law, our Founding Fathers were living in a very different world with a very different notion of what a citizen might have available to arm himself or herself with.”

I wonder if the associate editor would be as enthusiastic in applying her standard to the First Amendment. Should Freedom of Speech apply only to that written by a quill pen? The framers of the Constitution could hardly have imagined that a virtually unlimited number of readers could access her opinion piece instantaneously, online, globally.

As to her assertion that “When our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, citizens could arm themselves with a musket or a flintlock pistol. Users of these guns could load one musket ball at a time. Reloading the next round would take minutes.”

Actually, the Founding Fathers not only knew about “assault weapons,” some owned them. They were 46-caliber, military, magazine-fed rifles with high capacity magazines capable of firing 22 shots in 60 seconds. They even came with four, 22-round speedloaders. The Girandoni Rifle was invented in 1779 and was provided to the Lewis and Clark expedition by Thomas Jefferson.

I think we are fortunate that the people who founded our country realized that technology always changes, but the underlying concepts of individual freedom do not.

She has decided we should “trash the Second Amendment” and “take action to get semi-automatic weapons out of the hands of anyone who cares to own them.” This ignores President Obama’s 2013 CDC report, which documented, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”

Pat Fallon

Catasauqua