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’ 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.)