NRA Rightly Celebrates Department of Education Grant

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right that was specifically enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It’s not supposed to be touched, much less taken away, and it’s insane just how much misinformation there is out there about what it means, what it was intended to do, and how we should proceed because of it.

And much of the misinformation comes from supposedly educated people–a term that, in this day and age, only means you were indoctrinated to regurgitate certain bits of information in a university setting–who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

But the Department of Education issued a grant that would go toward developing a curriculum on the history and meaning of the Second Amendment, and the NRA, via America’s 1st Freedom, is here for it.

The University of Wyoming’s Firearms Research Center (FRC), housed in the College of Law, has been awarded a nearly $1 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education to develop a nationwide program on the origins, meaning and implications of the Second Amendment.

The grant—officially valued at $908,991—will support the two-year initiative titled “Armed with Knowledge: A Nonpartisan Second Amendment Initiative.” The idea is to design teaching tools to equip secondary-school teachers with high-quality, historically grounded instructional content. 

The FRC describes the initiative as a response to what it sees as a significant gap in contemporary civics curricula: a lack of educational resources and knowledge among teaching staffs to treat the Second Amendment with the depth, context and scholarly nuance it deserves.

Rather than presenting the topic through a partisan lens, Armed with Knowledge aims to provide “nonpartisan, historically grounded” content. It will dive into the clear history of the Second Amendment and give teachers to tools they need to explain this critical civil right. 

It will need to be non-partisan if it has a hope in hell of making it into schools, but a firm understanding of the Second Amendment doesn’t require partisanship. It requires brains that possess more than one active neuron to fire.

That’s it.

The Second Amendment isn’t a partisan issue. More accurately, it shouldn’t be. The right to keep and bear arms affects all Americans and benefits each and every one of us. It’s not about the right or the left, even if one side generally forgets that.

The NRA is ecstatic about this, not because it’s partisan, but because it gives us a chance to open minds to what the Second Amendment is about and to hopefully remove the issue of gun rights from partisan politics and into the realm of things that aren’t really an issue anymore.

Of course, while the FRC sees a gap in civics curricula, I’d have to argue that the gap goes beyond just Second Amendment education. Most students don’t really just much education in civics, anyway.

Regardless, this is good news, and the anti-gunners are never going to stop going nuts over this. Heaven forbid that people actually understand their gun rights. Why, they might oppose oppressive, draconian measures restricting their gun rights just so some middle-aged, suburban harpies can feel better about themselves.

Editor’s Note: I’ll be talking with FRC executive director Ashley Hlebinsky about this grant on Monday’s Bearing Arms Cam & Co. 

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