Court Blocks Bush Rule Allowing Guns in Parks

Gun safety and park conservation advocates scored a victory yesterday when a federal judge temporarily blocked a Bush administration regulation permitting loaded weapons in national parks.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted the request of three groups suing to stop the rule for a preliminary injunction. The National Park Service is now prohibited from enforcing the new regulation until the case is argued.

The groups are the National Parks Conservation Association, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The Bush administration finalized the rule, one of its many midnight regulations, on Dec. 10, 2008. It went into effect Jan. 9. The rule lifted the 25-year-old federal ban on carrying loaded weapons in national parks, instead deferring to state concealed carry laws. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, “Only the three national park units in Wisconsin and Illinois, which do not issue concealed carry permits, are excluded.”

danger signPark conservationists said that the National Park Service did not adequately account for the potential environmental impacts that could result from more guns in parks. Conservationists fear the rule will put animals in national parks at greater risk. The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies evaluate the effects of new rules on the environment, but the National Park Service performed no such assessment.

Kollar-Kotelly found fault with the Park Service’s procedures. The Washington Post reports: “[S]he wrote that officials ‘abdicated their Congressionally-mandated obligation’ to evaluate environmental impacts and ‘ignored (without sufficient explanation) substantial information in the administrative record concerning environmental impacts’ of the rule.”

In testimony before a House subcommittee, OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass criticized the Bush administration’s midnight regulations campaign not just for the substance of controversial rules, which is debatable, but for truncated and sometimes illegal process by which some were developed. (See Table II in the testimony.)

Kollar-Kotelly’s decision shows that the guns-in-parks rule is among them.

Image by Flickr user walker cleaveland, used under a Creative Commons license.

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