GOP Lawmakers Seek to Change Rules on Carrying Firearms on Corps of Engineers Land

So long as you’re complying with the laws of your state, you can carry a firearm in national parks or forests. This is good, because some of that property has some dangerous critters, and some of them are the two-legged variety. Being able to protect yourself is a good thing.

Unfortunately, not all public land, even federally owned public land, goes by the same rules.

For instance, property owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, which includes a lot of lakes and such that people enjoy for outdoor recreation, is still gun-free. That creates a problem, and some Republican lawmakers are trying to fix that.

A group of Republican lawmakers is pressing the Army to loosen longstanding restrictions on firearms at recreation sites run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, arguing the policy is out of step with other federal land agencies.

Led by Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), the lawmakers on April 17 sent an open letter to Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll urging the service to finalize a rule that would allow individuals to carry firearms for self-defense on Corps of Engineers-managed lands.

According to the Corps’ website, the agency manages more than 400 lake and river projects across 43 states, as well as nearly 42,000 miles of shoreline, 7,825 miles of trails and almost 95,000 campsites. Collectively, these locations receive some 260 million visitors annually.

Fallon described the Corps as an “outdated exception,” noting that agencies like the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management already permit firearms under certain conditions. As long as visitors comply with local and state gun laws, individuals are permitted to carry firearms for non-recreational purposes.

“Public lands form a complicated patchwork of jurisdictions with invisible boundaries that Americans cross every day,” Fallon said in a statement. Fallon called the Corps’ current policies on guns “arbitrary federal restrictions.”

Keep in mind that while this is the Army Corps of Engineers, these aren’t military bases. This is land that’s open to the public, and considering the other places where people can carry firearms on federal public land, some people are likely carrying illegally on these waterways and not realizing they’re breaking the law.

No one can keep up with all of the laws on the books, and while we can argue as to whether that’s by design or not–and I tend to think it is–the reality is that it’s wrong to try to trip people up. Patchwork laws regarding the carrying of firearms on federal land open to the public is just that, no matter how they try to frame it.

Hopefully, the Secretary of the Army, who briefly served as the interim director of the ATF, will side with gun owners on this one. As the Trump administration has tried to be far more pro-gun than past administrations, with varying degrees of success, there’s a good chance we’ll see the rule changed.

But it needs to change. The American people deserve better from our government.

Of course, we’ve deserved better for generations, and we haven’t gotten it, so I can’t really be shocked if we still don’t get it.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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