To the Editor:

I was very much impressed by Colin Criss’ article on gun safety.

I understand well the attachment of many to the hunting tradition. My husband and I spent many an enjoyable fall with friends and family engaging in pheasant hunting in northern New Jersey. They are some of our fondest memories of our former home.

We also engaged in target shooting and trap shooting in non-hunting season. But in all that time we never considered the use of an “assault rifle” as an appropriate weapon for such activity.

The very name of the weapon denotes its function. Clearly the framers of the Constitution did not intend or envision such weapons when crafting the document, and in fact the very language of the Second Amendment does not suggest that individuals have an unfettered right to bear arms.

The purpose of the Amendment was to maintain a militia at a time when there was no standing army for the defense of the states; it reads, in its entirety: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Supreme Court has in recent years ruled that this ensures an individual right to gun ownership, but not without reasonable restrictions for the public safety.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, “Some men look at the Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions…but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

In retirement he further wrote: “When I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.”*

I guess he was imagining young men like Colin.

Hazel Dellavia, Old Forge

Thomas Jefferson the Art of Power, pg.467,468.