Guns in Parks: The Hoplophobes’ Travel Guide to the United States

By David Kopel

Last week, President Obama signed a bill which, besides changing credit card laws, says that in National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges, the laws about gun carrying will be the same as in the host state. So in Colorado, for example, you will be allowed to carry a concealed handgun in Rocky Mountain National Park, if you have a state-issued concealed carry permit. In Vermont's Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, you can carry at will, since no permit is required for carry in the rest of Vermont. In New Jersey's Gateway National Recreation Area, you will need a permit, and since almost no-one in New Jersey except retired police is ever granted a permit, almost no-one will be able to carry there.

The law goes into effect nine months hence, as do the changes in credit card laws.

I was one of seven authors whom the New York Times invited to contribute a short essay on the new law, for the Times' on-line opinion feature, Room for Debate.

All seven essays, from diverse pro/con viewpoints, were pretty good, I thought. The comments from readers, however, were voluminous but often very weak. Many of them consisted of left-over talking points from the gun control debate circa 1971, with assertions that no serious scholar of the gun issue believes. For example, many commenters claimed that it is impossible to use a gun in self-defense, because the attacker (whether a human or an animal) will have the element of surprise, that ordinary people are not competent to use guns for protection, and so on. Yet even the strongest scholarly advocates of gun control acknowledge that there are about a hundred thousand defensive gun uses annually, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau and the United State Department of Justice. (Other scholars argue for higher figures, but the key point is that no informed scholar claims that successful defensive use is rare or non-existent.)

Surprisingly, some of the commenters showed signs of mental illness. One commenter wrote that if he saw someone in a National Park with a gun, he would report the person for making criminal threats. ("Well, watch out, gunnut gunwack gunsels. If I see your gun while I am visiting the parks, I will file a complaint accusing you of threatening me.")

Now perhaps that commenter himself is just an ordinary criminal, and for many years has been breaking the law by making false accusations against innocent people. On the other hand, the commenter might not have been intending to make a knowingly false report, but instead to have been accurately predicted what he, with complete sincerity, would do. A person's belief, without a sufficient basis, that other people are committing crimes against him, is a symptom of "Paranoid Personality Disorder.

The more common form of apparent mental illness among some commenters was Hoplophobia, which is described in the book Contemporary Diagnosis and Management of Anxiety Disorders. ...Having so much hatred, or fear, of guns that you can't handle the ordinary, daily conditions of 4/5 of the American states would imply a rather significant interference with ordinary activities. That is, a phobia. The specific name for this phobia is "Hoplophobia."

Click here to read the entire op-ed by David Kopel.