Guns in National Parks?

Filed in archive Outdoor News on January 10, 2008

Headed to your nearest national park? Gotcha your camera? Check. Gotcha your sunglasses? Check. Gotcha your gun? Huh?

That's right. Your gun. According to an article on Yahoo!, forty-seven lawmakers are asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to lift restrictions and allow citizens to carry firearms on landed managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So far, 30 Republican and 8 Democrat Senators have signed the letter.

Current regulations, developed in the early 1980s, "infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners who wish to transport and carry firearms on or across these lands," the senators wrote.

The policies also differ from those of some other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. "These inconsistencies in firearms regulations for public lands are confusing, burdensome and unnecessary," said the letter, drafted by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.

Kempthorne spokesman Chris Paolino said officials were reviewing the letter.

The current regulations, adopted in 1983 under then-Interior Secretary James Watt, say visitors to national parks must render their weapons inaccessible. Guns do not have to be disassembled, but they must be put somewhere that is not easily reached, such as in a car trunk, said Jerry Case, the National Park Service's chief of regulations and special park uses.

The rules were developed to ensure public safety and provide maximum protection for wildlife, Case said, noting that before the rules were adopted, "people would go out and shoot wildlife in national parks." Snakes, bears, wolves and coyotes were among animals shot by park visitors.