George "Macacawitz" Allen on Guns
 

Some of you may know that I work for the National Park Service, so when I see the NPS in the news, I take notice. At the risk of being called a fascist again, I submit that today's NYT editorial board got it right about guns and George "Welcome to the real Virgina" Allen:

November 22, 2006
Editorial
A Parting Shot From George Allen

As a last little gift to America, Senator George Allen, who was narrowly
defeated by James Webb this month, has introduced what may be his final
piece of legislation: a bill that would allow the carrying of concealed
weapons in national parks. The argument behind the bill is that national
park regulations unfairly strip many Americans of a right they may enjoy
outside the parks. The bill has passed to the Senate Committee on Energy
and Natural Resources, where we hope it will die the miserable death it
deserves.

Americans' confusion about the Second Amendment is now nearly total. An
amendment that ensures a collective right to bear arms has been misread in
one legislature after another -often in the face of strong public
disapproval- as a law guaranteeing an individual's right to carry a weapon in public. And, in a perversion of monumental proportions, the battle to extend that right has largely succeeded in co-opting the language of the
Civil Rights movement, so that depriving an American of the right to carry
a gun in public sounds, to some, as offensive as stripping him of the right
to vote. Senator Allen's bill is, of course, being cheered by the gun
lobby, which sees it not as an assault on public safety but as a way of
nationalizing the armed paranoia that the National Rifle Association and
its cohorts stand for.

If Americans want to feel safer in their national parks, the proper
solution is to increase park funding, which has decayed steadily since the
Bush administration took office. To zealots who believe that the Second
Amendment trumps all others, the parks are merely another badland, like
schools and church parking lots, that could be cleaned up if the carrying
of private weapons were allowed. The concealed-weapon advocates are doing an excellent job of sounding terrified by "lonely wilderness trails." But
make no mistake. Senator Allen's bill would make no one safer. It can only
endanger the public.

Well I'm a gun owner. They stay home. Only if I'm going long trip is one in car, truck. Allen must be smoking great shit. They F#$k around the few days they call themselves working and then some a-hole dreams this up.
MAybe link to Griff's rant thread?

The only positive I can see to that bill is you wouldn't be hassled for having it in the car if you stopped in a park on a trip/vacation.

Concealed carry in the park? No.
Visiting the Liberty Bell? No.
Smokey Mts? No
Grand Canyon? No.
Olympic? No.
Everglades? No
Mt McKinley? If you're hiking in Grizzly country...a big one and on your hip, not concealed.
Generally not needed...it'll die in committee. :cool:

EVER
 

And THEN you see that giant Burmese Python coming toward you!

Some woman, trying to take a picture of a momma Black Bear at Great Smokies, got her head dang bit clean off. Doubt a gun woulda helped in that case. Maybe some common sense would have, however.

I carry just about everywhere else. I see no reason a park should be different. I don't see any reason to expect the NYT to get anything "right" about armed citizens, either.

That's beyond comical.

Comedy
 

Why is that "comical"? Do you even have any idea how much law enforcement goes on in our parks? Drunks, poachers, artifact stealers, suicide cases, drug dealers, teenagers tearing up battlefields. Funding for Park Service law enforcement has been cut to the bone to the point where we have interpretive rangers doubling as LEs. You think it's better to fund faith-based organizations?
Haliburton?

WTF do you want? Until you spend 15 years working for the Park Service I really don't think you are in the position to say what is or isn't "comical."

I would very much like to be able to go to see the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, The National Constitution Center, and Valley Forge Park without being forcibly disarmed.

Whether or not I have a gun is none of anyone's freakin business.

And in case you were wondering, I live in Virginia.

Why do I have to disarm just to appease you? Who the hell are you that I have an obligation to make you feel more comfortable? The guy who plans on mugging/abducting/stealing the children of/ me and you has a gun? Why shouldn't I?

We've seen the future of gun control. It is Washington DC.

We've seen the present of concealed carry. It is Virginia.

Bring on the Gun crime stats between DC and VA. Go ahead... make my day.

Virginia is mostly rural, and its largest city is considerably smaller than DC. You may be confusing cause and effect.

It's been said elsewhere by Major Gun Guru Colonel Jeff Cooper that a collective right to bear arms cannot be practiced without practicing an individual right to do the same.

That editorialist is also pig-ignorant of the state of the scholarship on the Constitutional right, which view of the Second is the polar opposite of what he states. He's being about as smart about the Second Amendment as Klansmen are about the Fourteenth. Remarkable how ignorant some people will be; if I owned that paper, I'd fire him for incompetence and patent hostility to human rights. It's a matter of fact that no one who lives by the First should denigrate the Second; it is easy to see how they go hand in hand as overall checks and balances on governmental power.

HM, concealed carry's salubrious effects do not depend one whit on population density. Northern Virginia is in effect one large built-up area, urb upon suburb. Consider Florida, and Miami-Dade with its huge urban population. They have benefited from liberalized concealed carry longer than most, and crime is and remains well down.

Crime-lovers around the District keep things in their current unsatisfactory state of affairs. Were the country to put this matter into my hands, by a few simple changes of law I'd cut DC crime in half in six to eight months, with no bottoming-out in sight. In two years or so, Anacostia, a notably bad neighborhood, would be a pretty nice place.

Isn't there a difference though, between the right to own a gun and the right to move about heavily populated areas with a concealed weapon?

No. The right is defined as the right to keep and bear arms. They are linked. Being able to own a pistol does me no good if I need it in the community and it is locked in a cabinet at home.

About all the difference I can think of is you can benefit more people per stroll. Properly speaking, in the United States there isn't a difference.

The English are not raised to comprehend the idea of a citizen militia and its police powers -- while it's neither organized, nor very demanding of the individual citizen in any one day of his life, American law encourages the citizenry to do something about criminal or life-threatening behavior if at all possible. In a certain rather narrow range of situations, opening fire is about the best and only option.

This is part of our entire conception of a republic. Some will say that it was all very well for the Wild West but now there are police departments. That argument tends to dry up when it is pointed out that saving lives never obsolesces, and is by no means delegated to sworn officers only. In the early West, true enough, DIY justice and defense of self or other was the only available course, which made the West look pretty hairy though the actual casualty rate was pretty low, as most of the bang-bang was confined to those areas where there was a population mostly of transients, almost entirely of young men, and liquor. Strong drink got them shooting -- and mainly missing, when it came to human targets.

They are largely responsible for our needing it, though.

How so?