WASHINGTON – An election-year dispute over whether to allow loaded guns in national parks is holding up a vote on a massive bill affecting public lands from coast to coast.
Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to score political points by injecting a “wedge” issue such as gun rights into a noncontroversial bill.
Republicans counter that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to protect the two leading Democratic candidates for president by shielding them from a politically difficult decision on an issue many rural voters consider crucial.
Arizona Sen. John McCain, the leading Republican contender for president, is a co-sponsor of the amendment, which would allow gun owners to carry loaded, accessible firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges. Current regulations ban gun owners from carrying easy-to-reach firearms onto lands managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Spokesmen for the two leading Democratic presidential contenders, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, declined to comment.
The gun amendment is sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a longtime gun-rights advocate who has endorsed McCain. A spokesman for Coburn accused Reid, D-Nev., of bad faith in refusing to allow a vote on the issue despite an earlier agreement between the two senators.
Reid “is going to go against his word because he wants to protect Hillary Clinton from a tough vote rather than protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans,” Coburn spokesman Don Tatro said.
Reid spokesman Jon Summers called that stance absurd. “You take tough votes in the Senate regularly,” he said, accusing Coburn of “a transparent attempt to stop the bipartisan package” of noncontroversial land measures.
The bill combines nearly 60 proposals to expand wilderness protection in several Western states and establish the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area in Illinois and Niagara Falls Heritage Area in New York, among dozens of provisions. Coburn said the bill is bloated and expensive, and he has blocked it for months.
The fight over guns comes as nearly half the Senate is pushing the Bush administration to let gun owners carry firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges.
Forty-seven senators have signed a letter asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to lift the Reagan-era restrictions requiring park visitors to render their weapons inaccessible. Guns do not have to be disassembled, but they must be put somewhere not easily reached, such as in a car trunk, said Jerry Case, the National Park Service's chief of regulations and special park uses.
Thirty-nine Republicans and eight Democrats signed the letter seeking to overturn the regulations, approved in the early 1980s by then-Interior Secretary James Watt.
Coburn's amendment would take it a step further and write into law a requirement that guns cannot be restricted in national parks.
