H.R. 1483
House passed a bill that: will ensure there will be no federal infringement of Second Amendment rights on certain public lands. As to details, the bill:
stipulates that all designated lands within these areas would be exclusively governed by state and local laws regarding hunting, fishing, and the possession or use of a weapon, trap, or net.
October 26th, 2007 at 11:20 am
So the local yokels can ban those scary firearms from the National Forests? This seems more a can of worms than anything else. And can Congress actually delegate to states, and localities subordinate to them, the authority to determine constitutional issues on a case by case basis, which will lead to people unknowingly breaking firearm possession laws as they drive from point A to point B?
October 26th, 2007 at 11:52 am
Those local yokels can do that now.
What this bill prevents is a future Clinton Administration Secretary of the Interior or Agriculture arbitrarily prohibiting gun possession or hunting on BLM or Forest Service property, like some local foresters and land managers in Colorado and California are already trying to do.
And yes, Rob Bishop is my congressman. The only reason I am a registered Republican is so I could vote in the primary election where he won the Republican nomination for Congress a few years ago.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Mike, as Capt Holly, they already can. And it’s not Congress dictating to states what they can do per se, it’s Congress dictating what can be done on federal land. That’s a quite different matter (and the question of whether there should be so much federal ownership of land in the first place is a yet further question.)