Guns in the park are a bad idea

Alex Strickland

It was announced last week that the United States Department of the Interior revised regulations concerning concealed weapons in National Parks and Wildlife Refuges, making it legal to carry them.

This move, which has been talked about for some time and was firmly opposed by the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to be armed inside park boundaries. The new rule replaces a 25-year-old regulation that required weapons to be unloaded and stowed, usually in a car trunk.

Montana’s Congressman, Denny Rehberg, was in favor of the change and helped push the Department of the Interior for the switch.

It is, in my view, a bad move.

Proponents of the loosened regulations argue that the Second Amendment shouldn’t be upended when a citizen enters a national park. That may be a fine piece of logic for, say, Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, but it’s an entirely different proposition here in the West.

Early this fall, I had a too-close-for-comfort encounter with an aptly named ursus arctos horribilis (a grizzly bear). I rounded a corner on the trail from The Loop to Granite Park Chalet and found myself about 30 feet from a full-grown griz. The encounter was uneventful — except for the years taken off my life by the scare — and both that bear and I will live to see another day. If I’d been armed, who knows?

No, I don’t have a concealed weapons permit or the training that goes with it, but I don’t consider myself to be terribly skittish in the woods either, and the situation left me rattled. What happens when a tourist from Alabama who has never seen a bear stumbles into a similar predicament with a loaded gun? There is a potential for encounters that could have been harmless to end in bloodshed.

There is such a microscopic percentage chance of being attacked by a wild animal in Glacier, or any other park, that “safety” is a difficult argument to justify. Smart hikers and visitors carrying bear spray and using common sense to store foods and other items drop those infinitesimal odds even further.

Despite the many safeguards in place, national parks are not sterile environments and yes, visitors have died over the years who may have lived had they been armed. But I’d be willing to bet that many, many animals and maybe more than a few people have lived because visitors weren’t.