Department of Education Wants to Develop Pro-2A Curriculum

The Trump administration is making another move to advance and protect our Second Amendment rights, and this time it doesn’t involve the Justice Department or subordinate agencies like the ATF. 

Instead, it’s the Department of Education that’s taking a bold step to help ensure that students across the country can learn about the right to keep and bear arms, from its origin in 1791 to the ongoing legal efforts to secure and strengthen that right. 

The DoE is providing the University of Wyoming’s College of Law’s Firearms Research Center with a new grant to help provide teachers access to primary source material, instructional videos to share in the classroom, and the opportunity to learn from and engage with 2A scholars through both webinars and an in-person conference. 

“The doctrinal complexity of the Second Amendment is too often obscured by divisive discourse,” says UW College of Law Professor George Mocsary, the Firearms Research Center’s director and co-author of the first-ever law casebook on the Second Amendment, “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy.” “We seek to provide a much-needed apolitical approach to an otherwise politically charged topic, emphasizing the legal and civic origins of the right to bear arms, connecting it to the early principles of the nation’s founding and examining its evolving role, through legal interpretation, in American culture over time.”

… The primary goals are to enhance educators’ understanding of the historical development and constitutional framework of the Second Amendment; build educators’ capacity to teach difficult constitutional topics; and expand access to primary-source resources.

“Our project will honor the nation’s 250th anniversary by allowing educators to engage with the complexity and nuance of the country’s founding documents,” Firearms Research Center Executive Director Ashley Hlebinsky says. “As the nation approaches its semiquincentennial, the ability to not only possess an intellectually rigorous grasp of constitutional text, structure and jurisprudence, but also to respectfully discuss and debate with those who possess a range of beliefs, has never been greater.”

It sounds like the Firearms Research Center will be bringing folks on both sides of the gun debate to the table, which could be interesting if the curriculum gets into the history of gun control as well as the national tradition of gun ownership. Will educators learn about the efforts throughout our nation’s history to deprive freemen, Native Americans, Catholics, and other disfavored groups from owning firearms, as well as how those efforts are echoed and cited by current gun control fans in legal briefs and scholarly research? I certainly hope so. That is, after all, an important part of the ongoing story of our Second Amendment rights. 

I’m sure the anti-gun crowd is going to lose their collective minds and complain that the Trump administration is going to subject students to NRA talking points and gun lobby propaganda, but based on Mocsary and Hlebinsky’s comments it sounds like there’s going to be room at the table for those who want to restrict our Second Amendment rights as well… at least in the form of respectful discussions and debate. We’re not likely to see, however, the Firearms Research Center develop curriculum that proclaims the Supreme Court invented an individual right to keep and bear arms with the Heller decision; a revisionist history that’s hugely popular among anti-gunners. 

Part of the grant will go towards establishing a free digital archive of historical legal sources, one that I hope will be available for the general public to peruse along with educators. It’s vitally important that K-12 students learn about how and why the right to keep and bear arms came to be enshrined in our Constitution, but there are plenty of adults who could learn a thing or two about our Second Amendment rights as well. 

Mocsary says the “Armed with Knowledge: A Nonpartisan Second Amendment Initiative” will not only provide an education on the Second Amendment, but will “empower teachers to cultivate in K-12 students the habits of mind essential to critical inquiry, evidentiary reasoning and civic deliberation.” Lord knows we need to develop those skills in the next generation, and using the history of the right to keep and bear arms as the vehicle to provide them sounds great to me. 

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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