Showdown over packing heat in national parks

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

In 40 years as a ranger, manager and superintendent of national parks from Alaska to North Carolina, Doug Morris says he never responded to a crime that would have been prevented had a visitor been carrying a concealed weapon. Nor did he hear complaints from gun owners about the rule requiring them to unload and lock away firearms while in national parks.

But Morris, who retired three years ago, says he did see cases where visitors shot wildlife or fired wildly into the night in crowded campgrounds. That’s why Morris and a majority of his fellow members of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees adamantly oppose a National Rifle Association-led effort to lift the decades-old ban on concealed weapons in the parks. “Nothing is broken about the existing rule,” he said.

But David Yates, a gun-rights activist from Alexandria, Va., says he believes the current rule tramples the Second Amendment rights of all law-abiding Americans to bear arms. Yates, who usually carries a handgun for self-defense where legally allowed, has given up visiting national parks as “a point of honor and principle.”

“I won’t go there because they make a political issue out of preventing somebody from defending themselves,” Yates said.

NPS manages nearly 400 sites
Morris and Yates are on opposing sides in the latest showdown over U.S. gun rights, which would ease the ban on loaded weapons within some of the 58 national parks and 333 other sites managed by the U.S. National Park Service. The dispute involves a proposed rule change that would allow visitors with concealed weapons permits to carry their firearms in national parks, as long as doing so also would be legal under state law. Rifles and shotguns and “open carry” of loaded handguns would remain illegal in the parks.

The NRA’s long campaign to ease the ban appeared to be close to succeeding a month ago, but lost momentum when the Interior Department extended the period for public comments on the plan until Aug. 8.

The NRA sees the extension as yielding to “bullying” by anti-gun members of Congress who are “trying to run out the clock ... possibly until after the election, into a new administration.”

Interior spokesman Chris Paolino said the department wanted to be fair to parties who wanted to comment in light of a Supreme Court ruling in June. That decision affirmed the Second Amendment right of individuals to possess firearms along with the government’s right to regulate them.

Paolino could not say when a final decision would be made.

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