Group Wants Second Amendment Education In NY Schools

New York isn’t a very gun-friendly place. I don’t differentiate between New York City or New York state because, really, it doesn’t much matter in this context. Neither is gun-friendly and since the city dominates politics in the state, the two might as well be synonymous anyway.

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However, despite that stance as not being gun-friendly, one group is hoping to push the state to teach Second Amendment education in all public schools.

A gun-rights group based in Western New York is pushing for all New York public schools to beef up their Second Amendment curricula.

Activists behind 2AWNY.com have sent state education officials an “e-book” draft by Libertarian attorney James Ostrowski, who has made a career of battling New York’s stiff gun laws, particularly the controversial Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act of 2013.

Ostrowski, joined Monday by 2AWNY activist Steve Felano and Libertarian NY-27 congressional candidate Duane Whitmer in downtown Albany’s Hampton Inn & Suites, argued that schoolchildren should know the role guns played in the formation of the United States as a Democracy.

The e-book, billed “a primer on how to defend our most important right,” warns that throughout history, gun rights have formed a barrier against tyranny, sparing American citizens of the types of historical atrocities that occurred under Nazi Germany, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union.

“It’s a bad time to be disarmed,” Ostrowski writes in his politically charged manifesto. “The left is resurgent and more radical than ever. They are undeterred by the fact that every leftist regime that ever got power, inflicted, through state gun violence, widespread misery, poverty, strife and often mass murder.”

Now, I don’t disagree here. The problem, though, is that while it’s fine to support this particular book being taught in schools, I don’t think 2AWNY.com has really thought this one through.

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Once they open the door here, it’s the state of New York that will be in charge of teaching the lessons. That may well lead to the book being dropped for something that’s anti-gun. That leads to textbooks like those used in California that explicitly teach that the Second Amendment isn’t antithetical to gun control, as was recently highlighted by the New York Times.

In fact, at the end of the day, even if they taught the book, we all know that the teachers themselves would put their own spin on this; likely an anti-gun spin at that.

I like the idea, but the problem is that I don’t think anyone should trust the state of New York on the execution of it.

Then again, it’s not like they haven’t likely already taught something akin to the California version of the Second Amendment rather than the truth we all know.

Frankly, though, I’m not losing sleep either way. It’s extremely unlikely that this push will amount to anything in a state so anti-gun. Besides, the Bully-in-Chief that serves as governor of the state would never let that come to pass. He’s too busy burnishing up his anti-gun credentials to allow that.

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