USA –-(Ammoland.com)- “I am currently writing a marksmanship curriculum for elementary school students 1st – 8th grade,” Mary Ann Paczkowski informed me over the weekend. “The goal is to market this curriculum to home school families in California and to be used in a public charter school that I am currently working on creating in the southern California area.
“The help I need at this time is finding a good list of ‘civilian’ heroes who have used their marksmanship skills to save people in their areas,” she explained. “I want the students to learn not just about the military heroes that use fire arms but civilians too.”
Those are worthy goals—first developing a marksmanship curriculum, and also making a point of educating young minds on real-world occurrences that demonstrate the practical, life-saving benefits of an armed citizenry. And it’s vital to encourage the next generations to embrace their firearms heritage, lest the anti-gunners win their long-term goals simply by waiting for the current one to die out.
Part of their strategy is to keep kids ignorant about guns—and that’s also the most dangerous, and the one that can lead to tragedy if young people encounter one and don’t know anything about gun safety. The truism “Knowledge is power” applies here, as Guy Smith demonstrates using government statistics in the “Children and Guns” section of his indispensable “Gun Facts” online compilation.
As for helping Ms. Paczkowski compile that list she’s looking for, I suggested NRA’s “The Armed Citizen” would be a good starting point. But there are plenty of other examples, including news accounts like the one I linked to this morning on my “The War on Guns” blog about the Auto Zone employee who saved the day – and was fired for it by corporate. Part of an education might be the realization that everyone doesn’t always want to reward armed citizens, and that sometimes, no good deed goes unpunished.
“Any help in this regard would be much appreciated,” Paczkowski concluded, and I promised I’d help her seek it. So now I am turning around and asking you who are reading this – if you know of any documented incidents that will assist her in this worthy project, please tell her about them.
She can be contacted at mycurriculum1@yahoo.com [copy and paste into your email address bar and make the subject “Civilian Heroes”]. Please help, and please help spread the word.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. Read more at www.DavidCodrea.com.