Sensibly Progressive reports on some PSH from National Park interest groups. Pretty clearly, based on my trip to Valley Forge, it’s utter chaos in the parks! Or maybe they are full of crap and licensed individuals don’t magically become any different than they are anywhere else when they cross a National Park boundary.
6 thoughts on “National Park Carry Hysteria”
Comments are closed.
My posted comments regarding this:
Mr. Wade and McElveen’s comments are unnecessarily alarmist and have little basis in evidence coming out of states where shall-issue right-to-carry has been law for a decade or more.
First, the majority of the US population lives in shall-issue states, so people and their small children are already in close proximity to lawfully armed citizens.
Second, Federal buildings in parks have always been off-limits and they don’t have metal detectors. As before, law-abiding people will not carry in federal buildings, and as before, criminals of a mind to carry inside these buildings will do so anyway.
Third, carry licensees already have to disarm when they cross certain state borders, enter schools, university campuses, and the like. They understand and abide those boundaries, and they will do the same when national parks straddle states with different carry laws (such as Death Valley straddling CA and NV).
Finally, data coming out of shall-issue right-to-carry states confirm that licensees are an extraordinarily law-abiding demographic. In many states, licensees are 15-20 times less likely to be arrested than the public at large. Simply put, licensees are extraordinarily trustworthy people. There is no rational basis for worry about crimes at the hands of these people.
All said, the arguments forwarded by Mr. Wade and McElveen are simply unfounded. It is rather absurd to hear them arguing so strongly for something that has little, if any, rational basis.
Afterthought:
I suppose that what dumbfounds me the most regarding these arguments is their long and repetitive history.
Florida passed shall-issue right-to-carry in 1987, and similar arguments were brought out at that time. Since then, only 2 states have NOT passed some form of concealed carry law. During this 20-year process, these same arguments came up in state, after state, after state. Now after 20 years these fears of Mr. Wade and McElveen have yet to be realized! People, we have good, solid data regarding these carry policies. Look at the data, and distrust the alarmist rhetoric.
Public policy is too important to be swayed by empty arguments. We have the data, and we are smart enough to base our policy on it.
Thanks for the mention! I haven’t heard that the pending lawsuits have managed to get a court order against implementation of the new rule, but the anti-gun groups are sure in a panic.
The real problem with this is that if they let it stand nothing bad will happen, perhaps a few good anecdotes will come from it, and they’ve failed once again to prove the inherent evil of citizens empowered by firearms to defend themselves.
I also read from Wade about how the comments were against the ban. I spent a lot of time reading comments and they were for the rule change not against. So I called BS on this claim.
Excuse me, but isn’t the argument that without a magic court case incorporating the 2nd it only applies to the feds?
If these are NATIONAL parks, managed by the feds, doesn’t the 2nd specifically apply to them?
The National Park regulation would be actionable under the Second Amendment without incorporation. But such a case, based on a right to carry a concealed weapons, is not likely to prevail considering the dicta about it in Heller. The Lund article I linked to yesterday described in detail the problem with a lot of Scalia’s dicta in the case. The hope would be, for challenging this regulation in the courts, is that first you can get a lot of other precedent that sort of boxes the court in, so it just can’t point to the dicta and say “Oh, sorry, you don’t have a right to concealed firearms.” and summarily dispose of the case.
That was my point, and concealed weapons were not my concern. Note the story uncle points to today about the ineptitude of the PERMIT process.