On Feb. 23 the Los Angeles Times reported: \u201cIn a victory for gun-rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on bringing loaded firearms into national parks.<\/p>\n
\u201cInterior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday that his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. … Fifty … senators … from both parties have backed a drive to repeal the ban. …\u201d<\/p>\n
Note the change would see federal authorities — weirdly, given their almost universal insistence on federal pre-eminence — allowing different rules in different states, deferring to states that disarm interstate travelers. This is akin to the federal government saying blacks and whites must be treated equally in the parks — except in certain benighted Southern backwaters, where Uncle Sam will defer to local rednecks who prefer separate \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201ccolored\u201d bathrooms, etc.<\/p>\n
The proposed change would do no good in California, for instance, where state law (in violation of both the 2nd and 14th Amendments) prohibits loaded guns in parks unless they\u2019re locked inside a car trunk or similarly inaccessible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a place of refuge, not a place for hunting, and it\u2019s patrolled by state park rangers who are there to protect visitors,\u201d California State Parks spokesman Roy Stearns explains to the Los Angeles Times.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about California — where we\u2019ve have had some unarmed lady joggers dragged off by lions in recent years — but rangers elsewhere don\u2019t seem to be doing all that well.<\/p>\n
In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2006 — the most recent year for which we have records — 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 says.<\/p>\n
At the Amistad National Recreation Area that same year, a woman was found floating in a reservoir in about 5 feet of water. \u201cShe appeared to have blunt force trauma to the head and was possibly stabbed,\u201d the agency said.<\/p>\n
Two more 2006 murders were reported in Washington, D.C. area \u201cpark units\u201d — both gunshots to the head. (If gun bans worked, how could anyone get shot in Washington, D.C., at all?)<\/p>\n
And the \u201crelatively small\u201d count of 11 violent deaths in the national parks in 2006 doesn\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
\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
Half the U.S. Senate seems to agree. \u201cWhile park rangers now use bulletproof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry law exists are denied the opportunity for self-defense,\u201d explains Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.<\/p>\n
So, if 50 U.S. senators are of a mind to start restoring some of our purloined constitutional rights, what\u2019s the hang-up?<\/p>\n
Aha. Also back in February, The Associated Press found Senate Republicans protesting that \u201cSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is trying to protect the two leading Democrats for president by shielding them from a difficult vote on an issue that many rural voters consider crucial\u201d — the proposal, lodged in the current Public Lands bill, to restore the right of law-abiding citizens to carry their loaded firearms in the national parks.<\/p>\n
But why should the vote be \u201cdifficult\u201d? As I\u2019ve pointed out before, every candidate for national office who I\u2019ve interviewed since 1994, regardless of party, has insisted \u201cI support the Second Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why shouldn\u2019t Sen. Reid just let senators Clinton and Obama — and big-government nanny-stater John McCain, for that matter — prove they mean what they say, by allowing them to vote to restore the vital constitutional right on government lands?<\/p>\n
Because when Washington politicians say \u201cI support the Second Amendment,\u201d what they mean, of course, is \u201cI support the Second Amendment … which I interpret to mean that only our federal police have the right to bear arms, a monopoly they\u2019re free to enforce by, oh, gassing and burning scores of women and children in some rural Texas church as an object lesson to any other pesky Christians who might try to gather together enough legal firearms to form some kind of, you know, non-government \u2018militia.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, told The Los Angeles Times last month that people could be discouraged from visiting certain parks, such as Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, where he served as superintendent, if they knew the Second Amendment was in force, there.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many of you would want to go out there if you knew that people were running up and down the Appalachian Trail with guns?\u201d<\/p>\n
Gee, I don\u2019t know, Bill. I assume everyone I meet in back-country Nevada is armed. Keeps everyone real respectful and friendly, in my experience. Do you avoid police stations because the law-abiding Americans there are armed? Military bases? Why would you come to America in the first place, if you didn\u2019t like the idea of mere peasants \u201crunning up and down with guns\u201d?<\/p>\n
It was James Madison, in The Federalist No. 46, who dismissed concerns that the new central government he and his buddies proposed could ever impose tyranny on these shores, since any encroachments on our liberties by the new government \u201cwould be opposed (by) a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore a standing army can rule,\u201d added famous Federalist Noah Webster — who would later define \u201cbearing arms\u201d in his dictionary to include carrying a pistol in your coat pocket — \u201cthe people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe.\u201d But \u201cThe supreme power in American cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword,\u201d Webster continued, back in 1787, \u201cbecause the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole body of the people are armed,\u201d Mr. Wade. With \u201carms in their hands.\u201d<\/p>\n
In order to get their Constitution ratified — without which we\u2019d have no federal gun police, and no income-tax loot to fund them — that\u2019s the way they promised us it would be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Feb. 23 the Los Angeles Times reported: \u201cIn a victory for gun-rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on bringing loaded firearms into national parks. \u201cInterior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday that his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","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=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3248,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/3248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}