Middle School Malpractice: 2nd Amendment Edition

About 90% of what is taught in public schools is crap. In Illinois, that rises to a higher percentage. A workbook assignment on the Bill of Rights teaches that the 2nd Amendment protects your right to the guns the government lets you have and register.

“My son was given a workbook at school that is a compilation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When they covered the 2nd Amendment, he saw that they were stating that only ‘certain guns’ could be owned and that they had to be ‘registered,’ which he knew was false,” the parent said. “He bought this to my attention as he felt it was wrong to teach these things that aren’t true. I’m extremely proud of my son for his actions.”

“Me and my children are active gun enthusiasts and supporters of the 2nd amendment. I have discussed the 2nd amendment with them several times and explained what it meant and its importance to our country.”

While the parent confronted several school administrators, the workbook is likely to stay in circulation for young students across the state.

“I even told the school officials I talked to that you can’t reword the Constitution to what you think it should be and you should only teach what it is,” the parent said. “We live in a society where children are being taught to fear firearms instead of embracing them and our shooting sports. Heck 50-60 years ago you had police officers coming into schools teaching firearm safety and now we have schools teaching false information and fear. It’s a sad time.”

Unfortunately for young minds across the country, false information regarding the Bill of Rights and Constitution is rampant throughout the public school system.

Just last year, a Common Core backed textbook known as the most “widely adopted history textbook” was revealed to state that Americans only have the right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.

via Middle School Assignment: Second Amendment Requires Gun Registration.

Ironically, the cartoon that accompanies the brief blurb on the Amendment is much clearer and less offensive. In it, one man notices a gun on another’s wall and expresses surprise that the second man is a “gunslinger.” “I’m not,” the man replies, “but I have the right to protect my home!”

The assignment also mentions the genesis of the Amendment quite accurately: “The founding fathers included this amendment to prevent the United States from acting like the British who had tried to take weapons away from the colonists.”

The Second Amendment, of course, doesn’t say anything about registration, or even that the right is restricted to only people who have not been to prison. Registration exists – legally, at least – only in a relative handful of state and local laws, and the disarmament of felons derives from legislation. This does not mean that the legislation is automatically constitutional; the disarmament of blacks was once the law of many states, but has subsequently been recognied as and ruled unconstitutional.

This erroneous entry in the workbook was probably written by someone who lives in an East or West Coast State with a robust and oppressive system of registration, and who assumes that registration regime is commonplace. In fact, only 10 states and some territories (including DC) have registration regimes for handguns, and only 7 conduct any kind of registration of long guns.

The site that’s so upset about this workbook entry is one we will take with a grain of salt; it’s also chock-full of Obama birth certificate hyperventilation. But they are correct that the entry is mistaken, and needs to be corrected.