Please Oppose S. 504 & H.R. 1078 And Protect Our Second Amendment Rights
Gun Owners of America
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408

September 10, 2003

Dear Representative:

S. 504 and H.R. 1078 are bills that would continue the dangerous trend towards erasing our foundational principles from America’s schools — principles such as the right to keep and bear arms.

These companion bills will fund the creation of Presidential Academies that will train educators. No doubt, these educators will be trained in revisionist history and civics, because federally subsidized curricula in the schools have been teaching this already — chipping away at our national sovereignty and the notion of God-given rights for several years.

For example, We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution — a federally subsidized textbook — is so welded to a revisionist view, the Second Amendment isn’t even mentioned in the section discussing which articles in the Bill of Rights are relevant today! 1

And while the book does discuss the Second Amendment in a historical context, it does so in a way that causes the student to start questioning the wisdom of the amendment, asking the student whether the right to keep and bear arms is still as “important today” as it was in the eighteenth century and to decide what “limitations” should be placed on the right. 2

In other words, our gun rights evolve with the times.

So while our federally subsidized textbooks are NOT teaching the Second Amendment, which is in the Constitution, S. 504 requires teachers to learn about the “separation of church and state” — a concept which is nowhere stated in the First Amendment or anywhere else in our great charter!

And both H.R. 1708 and S. 504 require teachers to learn about the “key events, key persons, key ideas and key documents that shaped the institutions and democratic heritage of the United States” (Sec. 2(1)). The reason our firearms freedoms are supposed to be secure is that a majority vote of citizens, legislators or judges cannot do away with them in this constitutional republic of ours. If the U.S. were a pure democracy, our liberties would only be secure as long as a majority of the people were in agreement.

We already have too much Federal involvement in education, and the results have not been good. As control over education becomes more and more federalized, it seems that the ideas which children are learning become more and more radical.

For all these reasons, the members of Gun Owners of America request that you vote against S. 504 and H.R. 1078. Any such vote will be reported to our members.

Thank you for your attention to this very important matter.

Sincerely,

Larry Pratt
Executive Director
1 Center for Civic Education, We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, funded by the U.S. Department of Education by act of Congress (1998), pp. 153-187.
2 Ibid., p. 101.