Mission High School’s 45 percent UC Berkeley acceptance rate, despite only four percent of its students being math-proficient, is the latest exhibit in the long-running experiment of lowering standards to manufacture “equity.” When the same institutions that once demanded rigorous proof of competence now treat basic arithmetic as optional, they are not expanding opportunity—they are redefining success downward. For the 2A community this matters because an armed citizenry presupposes a literate, numerate populace capable of understanding rights, responsibilities, and the rule of law; erode those foundations and you erode the very soil in which the Second Amendment grows.

The deeper problem is that these policies are sold as compassion while quietly disarming the next generation—not of firearms, but of the intellectual tools needed to defend the right to keep and bear them. A population trained to accept that 2 + 2 can equal 5 at the ballot box is unlikely to grasp why “shall not be infringed” is not a polite suggestion. Meanwhile, the same progressive coalition pushing grade inflation in San Francisco simultaneously cheers for red-flag laws, magazine bans, and “assault weapon” restrictions in Sacramento, ensuring that the least-prepared students are also the most disarmed.

The remedy is straightforward and unapologetically Jeffersonian: restore honest measurement of academic merit, treat the Second Amendment as a non-negotiable safeguard rather than a privilege for the credentialed, and recognize that a free people must be able to count before they can be trusted to vote—or to carry.