By Johannes P.
Alan Clemmons, a South Carolina state representative, is introducing a bill to require South Carolina schools to institute a Second Amendment education curriculum, reports WMBF News. “Rep. Clemmons said he first thought of the idea after hearing about the Summerville student who was punished for writing a fictional story about shooting his neighbor’s dinosaur. The Second Amendment Education Act of 2015 would give students the opportunity for reasonable expression of the Second Amendment at school without fear of punishment. ‘If we let that go unchecked, the second amendment will cease being a freedom enjoyed under the United States Constitution,’ Rep. Clemmons said.” . . .
Under Rep. Clemmons’ bill,
Three weeks of a high school student’s coursework on the Constitution would be dedicated to learning about why the right to bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights.
Surprisingly, not everyone is excited about the idea:
However, some say what schools really need is more gun safety education rather than spending classroom time on solely the second amendment and its history.
I suspect that the phrase ‘gun safety’ as used in the article is really just a euphemism for gun control and other civil rights violations. Nevertheless, it does bring up a good point: education in the abstract is certainly important, and stopping infantile school policies that resulted in the dinosaur story incident described above is important, but nothing teaches or convinces people quite like practical experience.
If Mr Clemmons really wants to further the cause of gun rights in this country, mandating three weeks of dry lectures about redcoats, the rights of 18th century British subjects, and the theory behind our constitution isn’t enough. It would be much more helpful to offer actual training on firearms safety and use. The students may remember some of that dry history and theory. Bu they will definitely remember that time in school when they learn how to safely handle a firearm and hit a bull’s-eye at 25 yards with a .22 rifle.
Since it often seems that the people most in favor of gun control are the ones who have the least experience with firearms (and thus are much more susceptible to outright falsehoods on the topic) a little practical training and experience will go a long way toward helping to secure our liberties as opposed to a few classroom lectures. Am I right?
It should be named the Civil Rights Protection and Advancement Act. Require hands on firearms training and non revisionist history of firearms rights.
And when the ACLU and Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton speak out against it revoke their status as civil rights advocates.
They are racist. Plain as that. I am and many of us “people of the gun” are all for equality. Guns don’t discriminate. Sam Colt may your legacy live on.
If we had marksmanship taught in schools at the level of an appleseed instwad of “PE” our “gun control” problems would be all but solved.
I don’t think it is even that. Take knives. I knew sweet FckAll about how to use a knife until 8th grade home ec class. Used a knife to slice things, and did it safely. BUT before then, i was taught to NOT play with knives and be very careful in handling them, or you would get cut. Same rule applied to the fireplace in my old house, dont touch it, its hot! oh, and you will get burned.
How to use a cross walk, how to dial 911 for emergency things, don’t pickup snakes, don’t talk to strangers (my mom had me scared shitless on this one, Ted Bundy was a recent thing back then). These are all things my parents taught me, none of them rocket science.
Teach people how to parent, and I think as a whole society will be better for it. So many parents lack some basic skills – i work for a after school program, so i get to see a lot of bad examples.
However, some say what schools really need is more hands on gun safety and shooting education and training at the rifle range rather than spending classroom time on solely the second amendment and its history.
We need both, in my opinion.
2A needs to be taught in detail as part of detailed study of the ENTIRE BoR. Wouldn’t hurt to give a pretty good historical context as to why the BoR were written.
That stuff is given lip service at best these days.
Add to that bill a requirement the 4 rules are taught each year to the grade 6 and under…
Real gun safety.
What a concept!
It seems so many of the child gun accidents happen when some kid who isn’t taught gun safety is around a gun. Particularly when there is a neighbor kid involved. Lots of kids in earlier generations were raised around guns without these problems probably because they were taught gun safety from the earliest ages possible. I think parents had more common sense back then and a more reasonable understanding of the intelligence and curiosity of their children.
“It seems so many of the child gun accidents happen when some kid who isn’t taught gun safety is around a gun. Particularly when there is a neighbor kid involved.”
Yes. The one thing I want to see the most in the next 2 years is a bill to teach the 4 rules yearly to the young ones.
Just the 4. Let local police do the instruction.
Park that bill on Obama’s desk and ask him why he won’t sign a REAL gun safety law.
I *want* to hear his excuse…
That would be awesome Geoff. I’d love to hear his excuse also.
Our children’s education is none of Odumbo’s business, that is a state responsibility, Feds need to butt out.
@LarryinTX –
So, do you think the California legislature will pass a law requiring yearly classroom instruction in the 4 rules?
BECAUSE they won’t is precisely WHY a federal law requiring it is necessary. Nationwide. Every state.
It was so frustrating through grade school middle and high school to hear our rights get mangled by ignorant kids. Every argument or debate it seemed included the retort “it’s MY opinion! And opinions CANT be wrong! It’s in the constitution!” As usual the natural course seems to be away from substantial things like rights and responsibilities and toward wants and instant gratification. The freedom of speech becomes the freedom of being an unaccountable loudmouth.
Those kids are made ignorant by ignorant teachers or a teachers with an agenda or certain feelings about 2A. When kids study the Bill of Rights and the Constitution there should be no debate. Its what we have and the foundations of what we are. There’s no debating that. Those kids, and teachers, need to know that their opinion doesn’t apply to the BoR. They need to understand that if anything changes in those documents that we are no longer The United States of America. We would be something else as the foundation of what we are has been destroyed.
In order to teach the Second Amendment, you’d have to teach the Constitution, and you know where that leads.
Freedom?
Then you’d also have to get into the racist underpinnings of gun control and how they were spearheaded by Democrats. Whats past is past, right? No need to get into all that muck.
Yeah and our federal gov would not like anybody knowing their rights. The 4th and 5th are almost as abused as the 2nd in this country. Depending on your political views and race the 1st seams to be intact.
It would be really great if school, along with drivers education, did a hunter safety course, a pistol permit course for those turning 18, and taught the constitution.
Their failure to do things so basic makes public school little more than babysitting camp.
Especially the constitution. If the “government run schools” aren’t going to teach facts about our nation’s history and how our government is supposed to run, then it fails at education and should most definitely not be run by the govt. Makes me leery when the govt. wants to hide its own history and documents of law.
The age for carry permit and sale of a handgun is 21. Stick to rifles for the kids. They are much easier to be safe with, and less likely to be abused and demonized.
In addition to this I’d like to see at least one week devoted to every
amendment in the Bill of Rights.
Do I have to guess whether Rep. Alan Clemmons sports an (R) after his name or a (D)?
No? Didn’t think so.
Because if it were a (D) THAT would be the story, oh and there’s this bill thing too.
Republican. Democrats don’t give a shit about any rights other than abortion and gay marriage.
You forgot health care, which isn’t in any way, shape or form a “right.”
I wish the Representative would add “mutual reciprocity” to his bill so South Carolinians could carry in Georgia and Georgians could carry in South Carolina. All SC has to is add to their gun laws a simple clause saying it will recognize licenses from states that recognize South Carolina. Instantly, South Carolinians can carry in many states.
If A will recognize B’s permits only if B recognizes A’s, and B will recognize A’s permits only if A will recognize B’s, you get to play the game of each state saying “OK but you go first.” One of the two states needs to say “I’ll recognize the other state’s permits if they recognize ours OR they are themselves laying the same condition.” then the logjam breaks.
SC has this pesky training requirement. GA has no training requirement. So until SC goes Constitutional or GA adds training (maybe an Enhanced license like a few other states have?), nothing is going to change. We (SC) have been pushing for Constitutional for a while and it has been gaining momentum every year. Until then, any law-abiding citizen can have a firearm in their vehicle and any accommodations they occupy.
Oh. My. Goodness. I have a twin.
There are quite a few high schools that offer a hunter education course threw the JROTC program…My high school was fortunate enough to have a indoor/outdoor rifle range on the campus and a great JROTC instructor who also coached the rifle and pistol team that was open for students as early 6th grade.
Heck we even turned the cafeteria into a 30 point air rifle range to hold the state championships.
All in all, there are some great programs that are being taught but they tend to lack any support from the school and most of the parents of the kids involved with it.
Sigh, my high school had an auto shop and kiln shop both shut down months before I got there, a fabrication/shop class that I got to be in the last class ever and an ROTC program that iirc is still kicking despite being located in the heart of the city. We had a pretty kickass CAD lab though, taught my self to draw boobs on then state of the art machines.
(Old geezer mode /on)
Sonny, when I was your age we drew our own boobs out by hand! And we liked it!
(Geezer mode /off)
How did you download your porn though? I can remember desperately waiting for a single low res picture of a topless Tiffani Thiesen to print out while my mom ran out for an errand. Just got to the nipples when I heard the door. I made a pretty solid attempt at hiding the evidence but later that day I learned what a search history was :/
None of your buddies families had a modem?
This was the very first time we had the Internet and I was sadly ignorant of all aspects of it for a while. Even now my natural response to an error message is animalistic grunting and violence. I think I was born out of time.
Legitimate gun safety (to young children, eddie eagle. to middle/high school the 4 range rules) and a 2nd amendment education would actually be nice. However 3 weeks seems excessive for a tacked on addition to a class. It’s like making health class talk about contraceptives and abortion for 3 weeks. They can get everything done in 3 days so a time requirement that long would only bring about legitimate complaints.
If we taught contraception better maybe there would be less of these idiots running around….
It hasn’t helped so far…
If we made every girl in high school read: “What to expect while you’re expecting”, teen pregnancy would drop like a rock. I defy any high school age girl to think “Oh sex outside of an adult committed partnership sounds like a super fun and cool idea” after reading that.
As a highschool student I think this is a great idea. We had a discussion in English last year about gun control when doing an essay on “a constitutional right that we are at risk of losing”. You’d be disappointed how many people who will be able to vote this year don’t know what the the Bill of Rights (federal and state) is for, or why it was written.
If the antis were clever they would shop around high school seniors offering a bill of wants in trade for their vote for removing the bill of rights. How many of your classmates would sign up just for the free I Phone?
This is why there should be a basic civics test before being allowed to vote. I don’t care how anybody thinks this “disenfranchises” someone. You have NO business casting votes that will affect not only you but everybody else around you if you don’t even have any basic understanding of what it is you’re even voting for.
What we have right now is mob rule by the ignorant and/or malicious.
I think it’s less ignorance and more not caring. A good number of people are going to care about wants over rights even if taught the distinction. Not surprisingly this is something teens seem to excel at.
Since our current crop of 18 year olds are so immature, maybe we should raise the voting age.
If people don’t really care, they don’t go vote. At least people should be able to answer a set of basic questions regarding the constitution and how our branches of government work and what they are for.
Otherwise we end up with this shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpAOwJvTOio
Then you are being prejudice towards the “uneducated”! They can’t help they flunked thier way out of free public school, and had 10 kids! But seriously and unfortunately that will NEVER be a possibility because politicians rely on the ignorant, they are the ones easily swayed to thier side with a crooked smile and a few nice words. The educated(or should I say common sense people) already know why they are voting for a particular candidate, and have done their research.
I am 27, and never voted before this year. I had a severe level of apathy towards the entire process. I finally found something that matters to me and took an interest in it. I became educated about what I found important and voted.
I think that happens quite a lot, those who just don’t care just don’t vote.
It may be “classist” of me, but I DON’T think uneducated people should vote. There are reasons we don’t let children vote. If someone manages to reach adulthood without being able to grasp the basics of how our government runs then the freedom to vote becomes a tool liberals can use to enslave us all by manipulating the stupid and uneducated.
Maybe you take a test before you can vote. If you don’t pass the test, you are educated with videos and such about the constitution, our government branches, political process, etc. Then you take a quiz on it to prove you weren’t just masturbating during the video. And THEN you can vote.
If you cannot be bothered to sit through a “boring” video or learn the very basics about the law of our land or how voting works or how anything in our country is set up, then you simply shouldn’t be allowed to affect the lives of the people who can. There should be no enshrined right to be stupid or to harm others with your stupidity.
I’ve always thought the states should instate Heinlein’s requirement for voting. And I haven’t served in any government in any capacity.
Good idea!
But it needs to be enhanced with training.
This is a wonderful thing, but it should focus on a lot more than just 2A, gun safety should also be taught, maybe even “marksmanship” to actually familiarize with actual guns and not just illustrations. But it all is still going to boil down to what they are(or arn’t) taught at home. Most people live thier lives in blissful ignorance of anything going on around them, and the apples don’t fall far from the trees. Granted in that same sense if you get a child interested, the parents may find interest too.
Why complain that this legislator’s proposal is “not as good an idea” as some other idea? The perfect is the enemy of the good-enough.
There are a lot of good ideas; his is one of them. We should all be backing every good idea; a few of them will catch the public eye and move forward.
I – for one – would like to see the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers taught in high school. The 2A is as good a place to start as any; perhaps, it is the very best place to start. More-so than any other Constitutional provision, the 2A speaks substantively to the sovereignty of the nation being vested in the People. And, that government is to be feared and held in check, not blindly followed no matter what.
Would a “dry” lecture on the 2A bore high school students? I’m not convinced. The 2A speaks to “power to the People”; and, high school students are of an age where they are beginning to be interested in their own power. The power they will soon be vested with when they turn 18 years of age. Most males and a few females will have been playing video games with guns; the 2A will bring into consciousness the fact that guns are not necessarily merely a fantasy. Guns are a fact of life for better or for worse. In any case, a couple of weeks of lecture on the 2A ought to impress them with the fact that they have a right to keep and bear arms. That could make them curious about other rights to be found in the Constitution.
Mandatory gun safety education? I am all for students learning how to safely handle a gun! Methinks that isn’t what the “gun safety” proponents mean though by the term.
Which will make them even more angry. 😉 The plain fact is that most people in the middle on the gun issue who can be swayed, can be swayed to the left based on caricatures of the NRA as an unfeeling gun lobby who doesn’t care about anybody’s safety. Every ACTUAL gun owner knows that the NRA is one of the groups at the forefront of gun safety and education programs. The problem is…lots of people who vote about issues regarding guns… have no guns. They have had no personal interface whatsoever with the NRA so they dont’ know they do safety stuff so it’s much easier for the left to lie about something people in the middle just have no knowledge over.
The NRA needs to be fighting that with commercial advertisements that focus on gun safety and the gun safety programs they support. End this ridiculous notion that “gun nuts” dont’ care about safety. Hey, most of us would prefer not to get shot. We aren’t all toothless hillbillies. (No offense intended to actual toothless hillbillies.)
Publicly we need to focus heavily on Safety WITHOUT creating more legal restrictions. Safety through education not legislation (obvious exception being the situation in this thread re: education in schools), and really focus in on women gun owners. The two key points liberals use to sway the middle is gun safety, by lying to them that “gun nuts” don’t care about it and don’t do anything to create it, and “Old fat white guys with their toys and penis extensions who would rather be paranoid and play with their guns no matter who dies.”
We need to highlight and emphasize all the women gun owners, and self defense and how against women it is to take away our ability to self defense and that guns to us most definitely are not “extensions of body parts we do not possess.”
We hit loud and hard with those talking points and we win a lot more in the middle.
If I could wave my magic wand:
The course should be in two parts: History & Current Events and Physical Education. They would be taught concurrently in the 9th or 10th grade during the same quarter.
Week One: History surrounding 2A to include positive and negative examples, safe firearm handling, 4 rules, sight picture, airsoft range time with rifles, handguns, and shotguns.
Week Two: Current Events surrounding 2A to include events such as DGUs and abuses, range time with live fire (real) rifles, handguns, and shotguns.
The curriculum is designed to acquaint the student with knowledge of safe handling as well as consequences on both sides of 2A.
I’ve spoken of the need for this course for years. The specifics I just whipped out now. What suggestions do you folks have?
V/r,
When you speak of a week, may I assume you are talking about 1 hour per day, or less? Otherwise a week is sufficient for the entire BoR, all 2A would bore the hell out of everybody!
Oh, yeah. Two class-periods per day for two weeks is what I meant.
Sir, you are absolutely, 100% correct.
Good god, the last thing we need is busy body legislators requiring schools to conduct more indoctrinations.
The most important reform we can have in this nation is to rid us of the scourge of government funded and controlled education, especially at the federal level, but just as importantly at the state and local levels.
I trust the American people to decide for their own children what is important for their children to learn. I doubt we would be getting transgendered, anti-gun, white privilege liberal hippy trash if parents could choose for their own kids.
Lovely theory; but we can’t get there from here. I would love to see all schools either private or parochial; no government schools at all. Home schooling and coop schools better still. But, it will take a century or more to get there even if we had a consensus to do so.
Meanwhile, we have the statists using governments (Federal, State and local) to direct our children’s education in the left direction. Shall we leave this field of battle to the statists? If there is any role at all for government to prescribe curriculum it ought to be to teach children our system of government; starting with the Constitution. If we do that one thing well – teaching from the original documents – then we would be well on our way to solving our problems.
Your protest is counter-productive.
Look, I am all in favor of teaching our constitution, but this is about the dumbest fracking plan I could imagine–this legislator want teachers to devote three weeks to the 2nd Amendment. There is hardly time in a semester to cover a tiny fraction of US history (or any subject, really), and he wants to devote three weeks to one amendment! No matter how important the 2nd, the 1st, the 14th, the 5th are, none of them deserve that much of a semester.
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