Most of us who are parents send our kids to school. I did for years until the pandemic showed me that I could actually homeschool my daughter, so that’s what I did.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of amazing teachers out there. However, there are those who think they know more than they really do, particularly on subjects like guns and gun rights.

We’ve seen this more than once, too. A kid brings home their classwork and there’s some blatantly wrong fact revolving around the Second Amendment.

Most such teachers at least try to keep their ignorance out of the public eye, but a former teacher and superintendent recently wrote an op-ed on the subject that put his own ignorance on full display.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

When I taught government, my students would ask questions as to the purpose and meaning of amendments, particularly the Second Amendment. My response to this question was, “Our founders were painfully aware, because of their experiences with England, of a federal government’s potentially abusive power, and they were committed to the preservation of the power of the states. Our founders had, as a primary concern that specific protection. The Second Amendment was meant to be a collective-rights state’s protection, not an individual right to bear arms.”

There you go. Ignorance for all to see.

There’s absolutely no reason to teach such complete and utter nonsense, and yet, he did.

First, let’s remember that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights both specify “the states” in several places and “the people” in others. In every other instance when the text reads “the people” or “the people’s,” it’s a right that’s held to be an individual right. The Fourth Amendment, for example, is a prime example of it.

So why is it that the Second Amendment is somehow immune to that?

The author continues, though.

In 2009, to the shock of many Americans, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller declared that the intent of the Second Amendment was not to protect the states, but rather to empower individuals to bear arms and if that were not enough, in 2022, the court in New York State Rifle and Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen fashioned the ultimate blow by declared that citizens could carry guns in public settings without registration. The court literally moved the playing field and tilted it irretrievably.

No, the court did no such thing.

This ties into Cam’s post earlier today addressing similar claims by David Hogg. In particular, this idea that the Second Amendment only became an individual right to own guns in recent years.

It’s–and I apologize in advance, but I can’t help myself–Hoggwash. (Sorry, I had to do it.)

Pro-gun attorney Kostas Moros has heard all of this before. Last year, he started compiling a rather epic Twitter thread of all the evidence showing that no, this isn’t some uniquely modern idea of it being an individual rather than a collective right.

It's so amusing reading old history/law texts that clearly talk about the right to bear arms as an individual right, considering the antigun side pretends the 2A is a "militia right" and Scalia made up the individual right in Heller. This is from William Rawle. pic.twitter.com/clzWCwyAE4

— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) May 9, 2022

Seriously, go and read the whole thing. Block out a good long while to read.

Of course, Moros is an attorney, someone whose job it is to look at the law and understand it. Further, he looks at legal experts from the past and finds where they have written on the topic well in the past. Despite that, the person whose word we should take isn’t his, but a former government teacher.

Folks, this is, in part, why our educational system is so screwed up.

Teachers are people. They are fallible and flawed, just like the rest of us. Their expertise is, at least in theory, communicating ideas to young people and helping them learn and retain that information. It’s not in constitutional law or any number of other subjects where they often take their classroom authority to mean they’re an actual authority on other matters.

This was someone who admits to teaching his own interpretation of what the Second Amendment means in class as if it were the absolute truth, then presents that teach as if it’s an authoritative statement on the nature of the right to keep and bear arms.

Don’t delude yourself into believing this doesn’t happen with other subjects. I recall teachers professing facts in class during my time in school that I knew to be untrue, then calling me down for daring to disagree. None of these had anything to do with guns.

But this case does, and I’m not a student in the classroom anymore. I’m damn sure going to call this teacher out over his “facts” that are anything but.