By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
All eyes are turning toward the University of Wyoming, which recently received nearly $1 million in federal dollars to create Second Amendment curriculum for high school students that “highlights ongoing debates about firearms education in American schools and the federal government’s role in shaping how constitutional issues are taught,” according to a UW press release.
The U.S. Department of Education awarded a $908,991 grant to the college this year to develop what university officials have promised would be “historically grounded school curriculum on the Second Amendment.”
The money came from more than $137 million in federal funds that were redirected by President Donald L. Trump.
The University of Wyoming hosts the nationally known Firearm Research Center, which is one of very few college programs that do not add a leftist “gun-violence” perspective to everything they study and teach.
Instead, the FRC’s mission is to “foster a broad discourse and produce meaningful change in how firearms and the Second Amendment are discussed and understood in America through research, scholarship, legal training, and publicly available resources.”
FRC officials said the funds would create nationwide tools that will allow educators “to better understand the constitutional right to bear arms.”
“The doctrinal complexity of the Second Amendment is too often obscured by divisive discourse. 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,” George Mocsary, FRC’s director and a UW law professor said in a press release.
Recipients of the finished work will include UW professors, an advisory committee that includes K-12 teachers, scholars, public health experts and UW’s College of Education.
The finished product, Mocsary promised, will be extremely high-tech.
“Through a deliberately layered program of professional development, artificial intelligence-assisted archival research and open-access instructional media, the Firearms Research Center will empower teachers to cultivate in K-12 students the habits of mind essential to critical inquiry, evidentiary reasoning and civic deliberation,” Mocsary said according to the press release.
FRC’s strong 2A history
Any concern that the FRC may be secretly cashing checks from Michael Bloomberg or any other anti-gun hobgoblin are silly and not viable.
Even UW’s law school is pro-gun and refers to itself as “the premier law school for practitioners who serve the legal needs of all those who produce, employ, own, and regulate firearms.”
A quick look at its finished work products shows the FRC’s strong support for both gun owners and the Second Amendment.
Here are some of FRC’s recent reports:
- Bruen Means Bear; Heller Held Hunt
- Young Adults and Firearms: Why Gun Bans are an Ineffective and Unconstitutional Way to Lower Gun Violence in the United States
- The Debate Over the ATF Digitizing Gun Sales Records from Out-of-Business Firearms Dealers
- Second Amendment Law Applied to Attachments and Modifications to Firearms
- Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight; A Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Takeaways
The FRC’s final work product will be both noteworthy and extremely needed, because it’s high time to share real information with high schoolers about the Second Amendment.
While the Department of Education cannot force this curriculum onto schools, parents and real educators can and definitely should insist that their schools bring it on board.
Even if blue states ignore or oppose this federally sponsored work, the high schoolers who are allowed to learn the true meaning of the Second Amendment will be far more advanced in their understanding of our constitutional rights than their blue-state based colleagues.
This, friends, could be a big win for our kids. It truly deserves our support.
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