There are two things that I really want to see in my lifetime: one, an AR-15 on the living room wall of every American family home, and two, a complete and permanent separation of School and State. Of those two, I want the latter more because schools make the future by molding children’s minds and are thus far too important to be entrusted to government monopolies.

For a long time now, government schools have had a left-wing bent that’s becoming openly radical with each passing day. I see the results of that in the second-generation Indian American kids I know; they have grown up with a very negative view of America, her Constitution and Bill of Rights, while their immigrant parents are appreciative of America and her freedoms. This is the same for children of all races and ethnicities. It takes 13 years of non-stop anti-American indoctrination to produce a nation of self-hating citizens ashamed and embarrassed of their own country, and polls reflect that. (Colleges compound the problem by throwing another four years of illiberal anti-American indoctrination at young minds, but that’s a story for another day.)

Previously, I have written about how schools are cultural flashpoints and why privatization is the best approach to calming down the culture wars, and why a free market in education will be beneficial for everybody. The School Choice movement has made a lot of strides, but in the end, it’s a compromise measure that still leaves the strings of control attached to the hands of those who cut the tuition vouchers and checks.

So, as long as privatization is an impractical pipe dream, I implored that public schools should respect the pro-2A half of the taxpaying public and institute firearms education in school. The logic is simple: what’s good for the Sex Ed gander is good for the Firearms Ed goose. Sex education is as likely to turn your daughter into a prostitute as firearms education is to turn your son into a mass shooter, which is practically zero.

What I’m saying now is that the time for begging is over. Public schools should respect the pro-Second Amendment half of the taxpayers that fund them, but they don’t. It’s time to make them respect us. We will not be in the closet anymore. We’re out, and we’re proud.

What does going on the offensive mean as a practical matter? It means getting your local school district to add real firearms education classes that are not about just running away and informing an adult if you see a gun, but shooting, field stripping, and cleaning guns. Add rigorous training in marksmanship and perhaps even reloading spent cartridges. Have firearms education not as an extracurricular club activity but as an in-school class. Make it as integral a part of growing up American as learning arithmetic is.

If you live in a pro-2A state, get your Department of Education to develop a formal curriculum on firearms education and have them send it down to the local school districts so the work isn’t inefficiently duplicated. Ask your state’s Department of Education to collaborate with other pro-2A states’ Departments of Education to develop a multi-state shared curriculum. This may involve copying ideas from the rollout of Sex Education across the country, and that’s a good thing because there’s no point in reinventing the wheel.

Anti-gun ownership parents will protest, of course, but as the old Arabic saying goes, the dogs bark and the caravan passes. Give them the choice to opt their children out of firearms ed classes because it’s the right thing to do, but reserve the right to mock them for being prudes who believe in ineffective abstinence-only education.

It’s too bad it will come to the flexing of muscle, but that’s the natural consequence of government monopolies. Whoever controls them wields an outsized influence. If the monopoly can’t be dismantled in a civilized, peaceable manner, and if that monopoly refuses to respect us, it’s time for us to seize control.