Obama's National Park Service bureaucrats won't defend visitors' civil rights

Amend Constitution by Statute, Using EPA Laws

By Dave Kopel

"The National Parks Service has announced it will not challenge a court order that temporarily stops the late-term Bush administration policy of allowing CCW-permit holders to carry in National Parks."

That's the news media's backwards way of saying the bureaucrats running the National Parks are delighted they don't have to allow CCW-permit holders to exercise their civil rights in the parks, at least for now.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a temporary injunction, favoring a lawsuit brought by gun-control and environmental activists. She gave the Interior Dept., which runs the parks, until April 20 to respond.

The idea that parks must first undergo environmental-impact approval before partially honoring the right to keep and bear arms is a complete subterfuge and extremely dangerous on several grounds.

Most obvious, there is NO environmental impact of carrying an unfired gun in a park or elsewhere. Even fired, at the rate CCW permitees fire their guns, the impact is so small it is essentially unmeasurable. The District Court/EPA/Brady effort is a transparent deception, used by hoplophobes and gun banners, to stop a ruling that would restore limited civil rights (for government permitees only) and could save lives and deter crime.

The original 25-year-old ban was created during the Reagan era, reversing the right to carry that existed on these public lands since the nation's founding.

A bigger problem however is that, if EPA can be used to stop mere concealed carry on the basis of enviro-impact, what does that say for any form of outdoor marksmanship? The impact difference between carry and use is obvious. If the precedent of allowing EPA to regulate CCW stands, this invites the wholesale destruction of any outdoor target practice on public
land. Officials know this. Nationwide, public land is a mainstay of open-air exercise of the right to bear arms -- for practicing for proficiency and safety.

Using environmental threats to deny the civil and human right of self defense and the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is environmental terrorism.

The biggest problem though is that this repugnant scheme uses a statute and its regulations -- the EPA machinery -- to suppress the Constitution itself, namely the Second Amendment.

An ongoing and increasing problem, EPA and numerous other federal agencies, FHA, FCC, FTC, FDA, TSA, EEOC and others have suppressed First Amendment free-speech guarantees for decades. Now, using EPA legislation, people in charge are making inroads into infringing RKBA out of existence. Such activity is patently illegal. The terms of the Constitution can only be changed by amendment, as described in the Constitution itself, and not by law making from Washington or anywhere else.

People suggesting or implementing such actions should be quickly removed from office for violation of their oath, and brought up on charges of denial of civil rights and abuse of power. That had better happen soon, because we are reaching a tipping point. How many abuses and usurpations need we endure before people take to their pitchforks?