As you traipse through California’s national parks armed with only a camera or binoculars, don’t be shocked to run across a fellow visitor packing heat. <\/p>\n
Up until Monday, firearms were basically banned from most national parks. Now, each state’s gun laws extend inside national parks within its borders. In California, that means it is perfectly legal to carry an unloaded firearm as long as it’s plainly visible, and for those with concealed weapon permits to tote them, loaded or unloaded. <\/p>\n
It is a saddening change. It raises the risk of violence or accidents in places that are valued for their tranquillity. But now that it’s the law of the land, the National Park Service needs to put safety first and make sure the public is fully informed. <\/p>\n
The gun rights lobby spent years pushing for the looser law, resorting to the old canard that more guns equal safer people. The Obama administration, to its discredit, went along as the price for passing credit card reform. <\/p>\n
Guns are permitted in 373 of 392 parks, national seashores, recreation areas, and other Park Service sites (30 of them in California), including gift shops and restaurants run by private concessionaires. But it is still illegal to take weapons into designated “federal facilities,” including visitor centers, offices, or maintenance shops. <\/p>\n
There could be even more confusion in the 30-plus national parks that cross state lines, because what is legal in one part of the park isn’t in another. For instance, on the Nevada side of Death Valley National Park, visitors will be able to openly carry loaded guns as well as unloaded ones, but not once they cross into California. In addition, concealed carry permits from Nevada aren’t valid in California, and vice versa. <\/p>\n
The Park Service says the burden is on the public to know the gun laws in the park they’re visiting, though it plans to hand out fliers at entrances to larger parks and publish articles in park newspapers. Good. We welcome any effort to make this unfortunate transition as smooth and peaceful as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As you traipse through California’s national parks armed with only a camera or binoculars, don’t be shocked to run across a fellow visitor packing heat. Up until Monday, firearms were basically banned from most national parks. Now, each state’s gun laws extend inside national parks within its borders. In California, that means it is perfectly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-352133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}