It’s time for some more straight talk. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, has nothing to do with digital communication. To suggest it does is a ridiculous argument. The authors of the First Amendment never even heard the phrase “digital communication.”

All digital media that communicate with large numbers of people simultaneously are used to incite reactions and activities by those people regardless of relevance, veracity or legality. Many of those reactions and activities are unfortunately aimed at oppressing innocent people, and for the most spurious of reasons: skin color, religion, even political affiliations. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the like are digital media capable of gross misuse and must be banned. In addition to arousing great animosity and hostile behavior against entire groups of people, these insidious “social media” programs are misused to bully and ridicule individuals, often innocent children, to the point some of them become totally reclusive, devoid of self-confidence, and some even take their own lives! “Social media” are anything but social, serve no useful purpose to society — most of us really don’t care what your meat loaf looks like — and must be abolished for the good of the very society they claim to serve.

Without social media, the internet will still survive, email users will still be able to communicate with friends and family members — even entire groups of like-minded individuals — but unwanted intrusions into people’s privacy and security will be eliminated, making communication much more civil because of the direct connections between those communicating. Ban Facebook!

All right, the foregoing was written tongue-in-cheek. There is a certain degree of truth in it, but it was really intended to parody Mr. James Scott’s letter to the editor on March 14 concerning the Second Amendment and its protection of citizens’ ownership of semi-automatic weapons. Mr. Scott’s argument doesn’t hold water; his presumptions are erroneous. America’s history, specifically regarding our military weaponry, is rife with examples of weaponry that evolved into preferred civilian arms, which were never contemplated by the framers of our Constitution. Confederate soldiers cursed the lever-action Henry rifle as “that damn Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot all week.” They were, of course, armed with single-shot rifles. We fought World War I with bolt-action rifles, some of which went on to be the most popular hunting and sporting rifles of the 20th century. Our best rifles in World War II were the semi-automatic M1 Garands, referred to by General Patton as “the greatest battle rifle” ever made. Now civilians have AR-15 rifles, the legal, semi-automatic version of our military’s M-4 and M-16 rifles which are capable of full-automatic fire. Most civilians who own AR-15s own them for the same reasons they own other firearms: recreation, competitive shooting, hunting (yes, people do use AR-15s for hunting, usually rodents and other varmints) and self-protection. Some people own them just “to have them.” Some people who own AR-15s fear invasion by foreign forces, and some people fear tyranny coming from our own government.

That all being said, the Second Amendment isn’t about duck hunting, and the First Amendment isn’t only about newspapers such as this one, or speaking from a soapbox. They are both about protecting free citizens from over-zealous governments, our own and others, and those protections require access by those free citizens to the latest technology, in all current and future forms of communications and weaponry.

— Jerry Wright lives in Sisters.