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Guns in parks back on front burner and antis are furious
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The issue of allowing concealed handgun carry in national parks is back on the front burner, and could be voted on as early as Wednesday by the House of Representatives, as an attachment to the credit card legislation, which Congress and the Obama White House dearly want to pass.
UPDATE: The House Wednesday passed the bill on a lopsided 279-147 vote. The measure is now going to President Obama for his signature. He is expected to sign it into law this week. The statute will take effect nine months after the president signs.
Gun prohibitionists are having fits and are pulling out all the stops (and the boilerplate rhetoric). Same old, tired arguments, different day.
1) “Allowing guns in parks will make park visitors less safe.” Hogwash. Visitors won’t even know if someone is packing a concealed handgun, unless that individual is the kind of bonehead who has to run around telling everyone he’s armed. Yet anti-gunners are dishing out inflammatory, alarmist rhetoric with nobody challenging their hysteria.
2) “Allowing guns in parks will lead to increased poaching.” Who writes their stuff, the Animal Liberation Front? Maybe PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). This is nonsense, as defensive handguns are not commonly used by poachers to take down elk, deer, sheep or other traditional game animals that reside inside parks.
Families should not have to stare down loaded AK-47s on nature hikes – Brady campaign president Paul Helmke.
What really alarms gun banners is that they know concealed carry for defensive purposes works to reduce crime, and they do not want that to be demonstrated in yet another venue, our national parks. Every time the gun rights of law-abiding citizens are expanded, the gun control lobby becomes furious because common-sense carry laws erode the power they once enjoyed on Capitol Hill.
In the years since Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994 because they blindly – and ignorantly – followed the public disarmament agenda, that party has come to realize that gun control laws haven’t worked, and supporting them can become a political liability.
National parks belong to all Americans, not just those who hate firearms and the people who carry them. Gun owners have just as much a right to enjoy the parks – on their terms – as anyone, and they do not surrender their self-defense right, much less their Second Amendment right, at the park entrance.
Visitors to national parks should have the right to defend themselves in accordance with the laws of their states – Congressman Tom Coburn (R-OK)
By no small coincidence, the Bellingham City Council is now mulling a ban on gun sales within 500 feet of a public school, yet another exercise in Nanny State foolishness. The presence of a retail gun shop near a school has never been shown to make a school less safe. People who want to prevent youngsters from being exposed to firearms need a reality check, because those children have already been exposed to guns by television, movies and violent video games.
Bellingham needs to think this one through. State preemption may prohibit this kind of a local ordinance.
Besides, the proponents of this measure need to demonstrate where the presence of a gun shop near a school has harmed anyone.
What is really at work here is a bad case of hoplophobia, the irrational fear of firearms. It is a manifestation of social bigotry against firearms and their owners.
Councilwoman Barbara Ryan, quoted by the Bellingham Herald, demonstrated that much when she said, “Shouldn’t we be able to protect our own people? Some of us - me included - would much prefer a society where there are fewer guns and fewer murders and less chance of Columbines, but maybe we’re not the place to start the fight.”
Ryan, a Tacoma native, evidently spent way too much time growing up in San Francisco and living on the East Coast.
Hers is essentially the same rhetoric that was expressed by Louisiana educators the other day when the Legislature took a step toward legalizing concealed carry on college campuses. In Texas, there are also opponents to campus concealed carry, but the Senate is moving a bill that will allow that.
This could be an interesting week in Louisiana, Texas and Washington, D.C.
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