Carrying Guns In Texas Parks

Jerry Patterson defends his pro-gun stance on carrying guns in Texas parks.

Jerry Patterson, Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office

Recent exhibitions of my Second Amendment rights have earned some harsh words from editorial writers at some of Texas’ big city newspapers, including the San Antonio Express-News.

Specifically, I’ve been criticized for acknowledging I carried a concealed handgun, as is my right, on recent visits to Big Bend National Park. A National Park Service rule prohibits carrying a loaded, concealed handgun.

“Evidently, Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson was absent from school the day the Constitution was covered,” wrote the San Antonio Express-News.

While that’s an awfully cute jab, the reality is I’ve learned the Constitution over the course of a lifetime – not just one day. As a matter of fact, I’ve taken oaths to uphold and protect our Constitution – as a U.S. Marine and as a state elected official.

So let’s get past the sophmorisms and look at the facts.

The ban on loaded firearms in National Park is not a law. It is a rule. A rule enacted by unelected bureaucrats deep in the recesses of the National Park Service. There was no legislative process involved -- these bureaucrats arbitrarily terminated this Constitutional right.

Fortunately, the clearly unconstitutional National Park Service rules on possessing firearms in federal parks are changing. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently proposed new rules that would respect state firearm laws and the Second Amendment.

Nonetheless, some editorial boards are opposed to allowing citizens the right to self-defense. Lawabiding Texans, they say, can’t be trusted with guns and don’t need them in the park anyway because no one else can have a gun.

On a recent hike in Big Bend National Park, I found two expended 9mm shell casings, along with a discarded pack of Mexican cigarettes. The Texas Department of Public Safety ballistics lab confirmed two different weapons fired these casings. How could this be? There are no guns in Big Bend, because that’s the rule, right?

Tell that to the rafters who were ambushed and killed several years ago in an area adjacent to the Big Bend known as Colorado Canyon. Tell that to the woman whose body, suffering from blunt force trauma to the head, was found floating in five feet of water at Amistad National Recreation Area.

In 2006, the most recent year available for statistics, the National Park Service says there were 116,588 reported offenses in national parks. That includes 11 killings, 35 rapes or attempted rapes, 61 robberies, 16 kidnappings and 261 aggravated assaults.

With the increasingly violent criminal activity along the Texas-Mexico border, carrying a firearm in remote areas along the border, including Big Bend National Park, is a choice every citizen should have.

Editorial writers at the Express-News assert the current proposal to rescind the ban on lawfully carried firearms in National Parks is a “solution in search of a problem.” But the problem is very real.

We as Americans are guaranteed our right to keep and bear arms. Whether it is for hunting, personal protection or a defense against a tyrannical government, that right is unassailable and inviolate. To rescind that right when one crosses an arbitrary boundary into an 800,000-acre national park is an unconstitutional act no different than rescinding our Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure.
As an elected official, I take an oath of office “to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State, so help me God.”

I do not regard such affirmations as mere anachronistic formalities. I guess you can just call an old-fashioned believer in the wisdom of those who penned the Bill of Rights and not much a believer in the wisdom of editorial boards.

JERRY PATTERSON was elected Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office in 2002 and again in 2006. A former Marine and Vietnam Veteran, Patterson is the author of Senate Bill 6, the Concealed Handgun Law.