Much has been written here and elsewhere about the toll the Common Core Curriculum Standards have already exacted on hapless children trying to learn simple arithmetic. But make no mistake: Common Core is an equal-opportunity destroyer. What it endeavors to do for (to?) the teaching of math it seeks to do in other disciplines as well.
As an illustration, examine this lesson on the Bill of Rights from a “Common Core Approved” civics/government instruction booklet for elementary-middle school-aged students.
The photocopy of the page shown paraphrases the language of the Second Amendment as follows:
[P]eople have the right to certain weapons, providing that they register them and they have not been in prison. [Emphasis added]
Then comes a bit of mostly neutral editorializing in which the writers note that “the founding fathers included this amendment to prevent the United States from acting like the British who had tried to take away weapons from the colonists.” In the interests of brevity, I will ignore the missing comma that should set off the nonrestrictive relative clause and focus instead on the highlighted portion of the paraphrase.
There were several drafts of the Second Amendment that differed one from another mainly in terms of the capitalization of specific words and phrases. By and large, however, they all adhere to the general wording that 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.
Compare this language with the version above. Notice that arms has been changed to weapons and that the vital notion of “the right to bear arms” has been lost altogether.
But the biggest change does not inhere in what the textbook authors have left out; it is what they added. Nowhere in the original Second Amendment is there any mention of a provision that guns be registered. This is not just a matter of taking liberties with the language of the original document. This is out-and-out perversion.
Not every state requires that firearms be registered. In fact, 44 of them have provisions in their state constitutions that are in principle similar to the Second Amendment.
This is not the first textbook to historically revise the Second Amendment, but it is the most egregious. This is left-leaning propagandizing at its worst.
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