The University of Wyoming’s Firearms Research Center (FRC), housed in the College of Law, has been awarded a nearly $1 million grant by the U.S. Department of Education to develop a nationwide program on the origins, meaning and implications of the Second Amendment.
The grant—officially valued at $908,991—will support the two-year initiative titled “Armed with Knowledge: A Nonpartisan Second Amendment Initiative.” The idea is to design teaching tools to equip secondary-school teachers with high-quality, historically grounded instructional content.
The FRC describes the initiative as a response to what it sees as a significant gap in contemporary civics curricula: a lack of educational resources and knowledge among teaching staffs to treat the Second Amendment with the depth, context and scholarly nuance it deserves.
Rather than presenting the topic through a partisan lens, Armed with Knowledge aims to provide “nonpartisan, historically grounded” content. It will dive into the clear history of the Second Amendment and give teachers to tools they need to explain this critical civil right.
George Mocsary, the FRC’s director, notes that our right to keep and bear arms is “too often obscured by divisive discourse.” Therefore, Mocsary says, the goal is to foster an “apolitical approach to an otherwise politically charged topic” by connecting the Second Amendment to the legal and civic foundations of the United States.
Under the grant, participating teachers will receive a range of resources: access to primary-source documents tracing the origins of the Second Amendment, instructional videos tailored for classroom use, live and recorded webinars featuring scholars from across the political spectrum and even an in-person national conference for educators. Additionally, the FRC will assemble a free, publicly accessible digital archive of historical legal sources.
Leaders of the initiative say one of its central ambitions is to bolster civic literacy and encourage informed, respectful discussion about the Second Amendment among future generations. According to the FRC’s executive director, Ashley Hlebinsky, the project will mark the upcoming 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding by helping teachers and students alike engage deeply with the U.S. Constitution.
The FRC, founded in 2023, is a nonpartisan research institution devoted to constitutional education, legal-historical scholarship and public resources related to firearms and the Second Amendment.
By channeling federal educational resources toward high-school civics instruction on the Second Amendment—grounded in history, law and constitutional theory—the program has the potential to impact how more young Americans see this critical part of the U.S. Constitution.
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