Study Raises Alarm About 1st Amendment, But What About 2nd?

[FWiedner]

Study Raises Alarm About 1st Amendment, But What About 2nd?

By Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman


Raising the alarm about how high school students view the First Amendment, the Associated Press reported several days ago that a study, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, revealed that many students think government censorship of newspapers is just fine.

These students believe that the First Amendment goes “too far” in its protection of the freedoms of speech, religion, press and assembly.

This caused the Foundation’s Hodding Carter III to observe, “These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.”

Equally concerned about the results of the $1 million study, done by the University of Connecticut early in 2004, was Linda Puntney with the Journalism Education Association. In the report, she stated, “Schools don’t do enough to teach the First Amendment.”

Hodding, Linda: Welcome to the party. This has been a problem faced by Second Amendment scholars and advocates for many years.

We’ve never encountered a Second Amendment specialist who did not also righteously defend the First, and all the other Amendments in the Bill of Rights. Alas, too many First Amendment devotees skip the Second altogether and go on to the other Amendments, particularly when it comes to discussing individual rights.

Schools don’t do enough to teach the Second Amendment. In many cases, they don’t do anything at all. That’s a problem the Second Amendment Foundation has been addressing for more than three decades, and it has been an uphill battle. In today’s politically correct classroom environment, it’s virtually taboo to talk about firearms, and showing an interest in guns can get your photo banned from the high school yearbook, as happened this year to a New Hampshire student who wanted to appear with his skeet gun and shooting vest in his official senior class portrait.

If Mr. Carter wants to discuss “ignorance about the basics,” he needs to include reports in print and broadcast media that almost daily exhibit an alarming ignorance, and in many cases an abhorrence, toward firearms and the people who own them. Reporters inject their copy with such phrases as “high-powered assault weapon” when the firearm is neither an “assault weapon” (whatever that really is), nor is it very powerful when compared to typical hunting rifles. Editors insist that you “don’t need an assault rifle to hunt ducks,” revealing that they know nothing about duck hunting, don’t understand that the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting anyway, and have forgotten that it is not a “Bill of Needs” but a “Bill of Rights.”

This ignorance, accompanied by arrogance, was obvious in the Associated Press report about this study, in which a reporter wrote, “The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.” What self-serving poppycock. All the amendments in the Bill of Rights are “original,” and when it comes to being the “cornerstone of the way of life” in this country, we didn’t defeat England, Mexico, Spain, Japan and Germany with typewriters.

Today, a growing majority of legal scholars including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe acknowledge – albeit begrudgingly in some cases – that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. It deserves the same zealous defense as the right of free speech and assembly, and the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.

Most assuredly, it deserves the same interpretation as other Amendments that specifically allude to rights “of the people,” a phrase found in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments as well as the Second.

Yet, when it comes to the Second Amendment, the majority of reporters treat it as though it were the leper colony of civil rights; a black sheep of an otherwise sterling family. So, perhaps Mr. Carter and Ms. Puntney will forgive us when we don’t reflexively join the whine about a bunch of high schoolers who think the government ought to ratchet down on reporters and editors. After all, that’s exactly the kind of restrictive approach that reporters and editors have been supporting for years when it comes to gun owners.

Hurts, doesn’t it?

Alan Gottlieb is founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org). Dave Workman is senior editor of Gun Week, a SAF-owned newspaper

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