On Dec. 31, the daily Miami Herald editorialized:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bush administration last month gave the National Rifle Association a parting gift by lifting a decades-long ban on concealed weapons in national parks. …<\/p>\n
\u201cThese harmful new rules could take years to undo,\u201d warned the suntanned statists. \u201cMake no mistake, though, they must be taken off the books before they can do too much damage. …<\/p>\n
\u201cBeginning on Jan. 9, Everglades and Biscayne national parks … and the dozens of federal wildlife refuges and forests in Florida will be open to visitors packing guns. Under the new rule, anyone in Florida with a concealed weapons permit qualifies to bring a gun into a national park. There are more than 537,000 Florida residents with concealed weapons permits.<\/p>\n
\u201cAllowing visitors to carry firearms into these national treasures makes no sense. The weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has reduced poaching of endangered species and kept the level of violence between people to a minimum.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new rules, partially restoring a guaranteed civil and constitutional right, \u201cwere promulgated by the Interior Department but clearly came straight from the White House,\u201d the Herald complains. \u201cSo the department that is charged with protecting our legacy of federally owned parks, refuges and wildernesses instead has been forced to put these lands and the people who visit them at greater risk. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Goodness; where to begin?<\/p>\n
Surely the top priority of the federal government (the reason \u201cgovernments are instituted among men\u201d) is to protect and defend our liberties, among which one of the foremost is our right to keep and bear arms. (Even the current \u201crules change\u201d restores this right only in part. Since most national park visitors come from far away, what are the chances most will have the slightest idea how to obtain the required \u201cstate permit?\u201d)<\/p>\n
The statists at the Herald reply, \u201cThe weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has reduced poaching of endangered species and kept the level of violence between people to a minimum.\u201d<\/p>\n
First, since we\u2019re talking primarily about the kind of self-defense weapon for which I might receive a state \u201cconcealed carry permit,\u201d I find the inclusion of this reference to \u201cpoaching\u201d rather odd. In fact, this supposed gun ban did little to limit the nearly industrial levels of gator poaching by the locals which continued for decades in the Everglades. The population of big cats down thataway also seems suspiciously small, if no \u201cpoaching\u201d or trapping has been going on since the 1930s. (Fewer than 100 Florida panthers are believed to persist in the wild.)<\/p>\n
The federals — who also operate the Corps of Engineers, which has been diverting water away from the glades for 60 years — haven\u2019t even done a very good job of keeping most of the wetlands wet, for heaven\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n
Second — while in an emergency you use what you\u2019ve got — anyone intent on \u201cpoaching\u201d a bear or other large animal with a small, concealable handgun might, I suppose, get pretty much what he or she deserves.<\/p>\n
But what really puzzles me is what on earth these minions of Washington City mean when they say, \u201cThe weapons ban has worked well all these years. It has … kept the level of violence between people to a minimum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Did going unarmed \u201cwork well\u201d for unarmed hikers Mary Cooper, 56, and her daughter, Susanna Stodden, 27, whose bodies were found, shot in the head, alongside the Pinnacle Lake Trail in the Mount Baker\/Snoqualmie National Forest, east of Everett, Wash., by a hiker on July 11, 2006?<\/p>\n
Technically, since the National Forests are administered differently from the National Parks and Monuments (though the folks at the Herald don\u2019t seem to know that), the Seattle mother and daughter could have gone armed in that National Forest, so long as they\u2019d obeyed Washington state law.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it would have helped to encourage them, had as much signage as they use to warn about forest fires been devoted to warning hikers \u201cWe\u2019ve only got a handful of rangers to protect an area the size of a small state, here. Your protection is your own job.\u201d<\/p>\n
(According to Washington Trails magazine, there were only five armed law enforcement rangers working the entire Mount Baker\/Snoqualmie National Forest — a patch of public land larger than the state of Delaware — when the women died. Was that number adequate to protect public safety? Forest Supervisor Rob Iwamoto told the magazine \u201cNo.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Our parks \u201ctoday are some of the safest places in the country,\u201d the Herald editorialists insist.<\/p>\n
Tell that to Barbara Schoener, who in April of 1994 was attacked by an 82-pound female lion … as she was jogging along a park trail in the Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento. The lion bit her neck and crushed her skull. Then it dragged the unarmed woman three hundred feet down a hill and ate her face, upper back, lungs, spleen, pancreas, kidneys, stomach, liver and small intestines.<\/p>\n
In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2006, one man was stabbed to death by a drunk and, in a separate incident, a woman was shot dead. Also that year, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a woman parked at an overlook and wearing headphones while studying for final exams \u201cwas killed by a handgun by a suspect on a killing spree,\u201d the Park Service reports.<\/p>\n
How did the ban on carrying self-defense weapons \u201cwork well\u201d for them?<\/p>\n
And the \u201crelatively small\u201d count of 11 violent deaths in the national parks in 2006 didn\u2019t include rapes, other non-fatal assaults, or places from which law-abiding citizens are now de facto excluded, such as the Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson, where locals say the stream of illegal immigrants being hauled north by their \u201ccoyotes\u201d can make the place resemble an old-fashioned stock car track.<\/p>\n
Yes, you could say our parks have been \u201csome of the safest places in the country\u201d — if you want to compare them to such other victim-disarmament zones as the District of Columbia, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit …<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re hiking in the back country and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there\u2019s no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time,\u201d explains Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile park rangers now use bulletproof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry laws exist are denied the opportunity for self-defense,\u201d explained Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., back before the departing Bush administration finally decided to help us law-abiding victims even up the odds against our would-be assailants, just a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Dec. 31, the daily Miami Herald editorialized: \u201cThe Bush administration last month gave the National Rifle Association a parting gift by lifting a decades-long ban on concealed weapons in national parks. … \u201cThese harmful new rules could take years to undo,\u201d warned the suntanned statists. \u201cMake no mistake, though, they must be taken off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-2p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2854,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/2854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}