Showdown over packing heat in national parks

25-year-old rules
Under rules last updated 25 years ago, visitors to the parks must keep all firearms unloaded and inaccessible, generally locked in a trunk or elsewhere in a vehicle.

When those rules were written, just a handful of states allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons. Since then, with help from campaigns by the NRA and other groups, all but two states now allow citizens to obtain permits to carry loaded, concealed handguns. In many of those, known as “shall issue” states, any citizen who is entitled to own a handgun may obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Given changing state laws, the NRA for years has said rules for national parks should change so that gun laws are consistent on parklands within each state. But a bigger issue, an NRA spokesman told msnbc.com, is the right that all “law-abiding Americans” have to self-defense.

“Just because you’re in a national park or on federal land doesn’t mean you’re immune to crime,” said Andrew Arulanandam, the association’s director of public affairs.

Opponents counter that the crime rate in national parks is very low. “They’re extremely safe places,” said Bryan Faehner of the National Parks Conservation Association, which opposes the rule change. “You have a higher likelihood of being hit by lighting.”

In recent years, statistics from NPS’ nearly 400 sites, which receive about 275 million visits a year, show a rate of less than one violent crime per 100,000 visits. According to the FBI, in 2006 the average rate of violent crimes in cities across the United States was 474 per 100,000 people.

The low rate does not sway the NRA. “The fact that you can throw a statistic out there is not going to provide any consolation to the family of someone who lost their life in a park,” Arulanandam said, adding that “violent crime rates have decreased (as) … the number of states that have right-to-carry laws has increased.”

Foes of allowing guns in parks point out that the move is opposed by current NPS Director Mary Bomar, seven former directors and the Association of National Park Rangers, among others.

“The No. 1 best argument is that the resource managers are against it,” said Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

'Resistance to change'
But Yates, a member of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said he believes the park service’s opposition is a matter of “institutional resistance to change.”

“They simply have a culture that is averse to the concept of self-defense,” he said.

He and the NRA’s Arulanandam said that rangers shouldn’t base their fears on past experiences with guns in parks, since those incidents involved people who were breaking the law to begin with.

Not necessarily, said former Ranger Morris, who served as superintendent of Shenandoah, Sequoia-Kings Canyon and Saguaro national parks during his career. He recounted cases in California where campers, legally transporting guns in vehicles, were frightened by black bears.

“They somehow found their gun, got it loaded and shot the bear,” he said. “In one case, they hit the bear and they did not kill it. The bear just danced around the campground kind of angry until a ranger came and had to kill it.”

Black bears and many other animals in parks hardly ever pose serious threats to humans, Morris said, but “people who visit these parks are really out of their comfort zone and … they perceive threats that just don’t exist.”

Rangers also worry that allowing concealed guns in campgrounds could lead to more human vs. human conflict.

A potential for irony?
Hamm of the Brady Campaign, who once worked at Interior himself, stressed that many sites administered by the NPS are urban and the rule change could have interesting consequences by overriding state laws that work in concert with state right-to-carry permits.

Under Georgia state law, for example, “You can’t bring a gun into the Georgia state Capitol but under this loosening of the laws, I don’t see how you could argue that you wouldn’t be allowed to carry a concealed weapon into the Martin Luther King historic site,” he said. “There’s some irony there.”

Both sides use consistency to make their case, with the NRA saying that one set of rules for all national parks would be easy to follow. But opponents argue that rules still would vary depending on the state the park is in; also, they say, some national parks extend across state borders, creating potential conflicts.

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