Author: Mark Shean, author of #1 rated GUN SENSE on Amazon.
I initially got involved with giving the state required basic firearm safety course when my son became old enough,(15) to apply for his firearm identification card,(FID). I started looking for an instructor that would give the course, at that time it was a separate course than the one given for the license to carry, (LTC). I found instructors, but each one told me they only gave the LTC course, good only for 21 and older, “there was more money in it” an instructor told me. I retorted by saying to him, (because by then I was starting to get fed up) “when you dinosaur’s go extinct the shooting sports will go extinct with you because you ignored the kids”!
I could not believe how short sighted these people were. So I became a state instructor, my son was my first classroom ‘victim’ for his FID card, then I began giving the course to the 15-20 year old group exclusively. Now the course will cover either age group with no distinctions.
I know how important it is to include our youth in the shooting sports, that is how I started, it is the only way these traditions have any hope of surviving into the future. I think that we as adults kind of overlook how important it really is to talk to our children about their rights under the Constitution. If we don’t talk to them how will they ever know? Share your passion of firearm freedom with them. Don’t depend on the public school system to educate them about their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Schools/teachers unions, are anti Second Amendment, their ultimate agenda is to rewrite history by leaving out, and/or ‘re-interpreting’ whole sections of our Constitution and passing it off as factual to our children. By making the framers of the Constitution nary a footnote in history. So please talk to your children about their rights if you don’t want them to lose these rights. Home schooling is a good antidote to misinformation.
We fight hard to keep a certain class of politicians in line concerning our rights, we do not overlook their assaults on the Constitution, we can get very energized at the polls to ‘kick the bums out’ as we can on election day. But stop and think, do you take the time to explain the way you feel about your freedoms to your children? Do you take the time to make sure they understand that these freedoms can only survive if they too fight someday against the agendas of a few bad people willing to abuse their powers while holding political office? It has to come from you, as the adult, as it did from your parents when the terror that was WWII was very real in their lives. They held their freedoms very dear indeed.
The importance of this seems to become more and more diluted, as the years pass, than when I was young. Try a test to see what, if anything, has been taught to your children about the Constitution, the founders, or the Bill of Rights in school. Simply ask them if they have ever heard of the history behind the forming of American Independence, you may be shocked at their answers or lack thereof. It will be a clear message, and duty for you to teach them yourself in this area.
The Constitution is only as strong as the current generation who protect it. If our young have no idea it exists, their rights will cease to exist along with their freedoms in the not so distant future. Firearm rights are the keystone of those freedoms.
Mark Shean, Author of #1 rated GUN SENSE, found on Amazon.
written 8-27-2010
This is a quote from an original Patriot who understood this all to well;
” The voice of tradition. I trust, will inform posterity of our struggles for freedom. If our descendants be worthy the name of Americans they will preserve and hand down to their latest posterity the transactions of the present times“ PATRICK HENRY, 6-5-1788
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