Along the rim of the Grand Canyon, rifle-toting visitors will stand next to unarmed tourists from abroad. While Civil War re-enactors will still flock with their historic muskets to the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania, modern-day militiamen will be able to retrace Pickett's Charge carrying modern-day weapons.
Doug Pensinger, Getty Images
The new rule allowing people with permits to carry guns in national parks passed in May after it got tacked on to a credit card reform bill. Here, a crowd gathers at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.
The change passed on a bipartisan vote in May as an amendment to an Obama administration credit card reform bill. It grew out of changes sought in the final months by the Bush administration and gun rights advocates.
"This new rule is welcome," said National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. "Violent crimes do occur in our national parks, which have become havens for drug trafficking and drug production. It's reasonable for law-abiding people to have the means to protect themselves from predators, whether it's the four-legged or two-legged variety."
"It's a bad idea," the coalition's Bill Wade said. "It's a significant departure from what the public expects in the national parks. They've always been a sanctuary where people can go and feel safe."
Violent crimes -- homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- have been declining for more than a decade in the national parks, according to FBI statistics. The rate for those crimes in 2008, the latest figures available, was 0.13 per 100,000 recreational park visitors. The nationwide crime rate: 454.5 per 100,000.
Even in states where carrying a gun is legal, visitors in all but 40 parks where hunting is permitted will be barred from firing their weapons.
Guns will still be prohibited inside visitor centers, offices, maintenance facilities or other buildings where park employees work on a regular basis. The rules are murkier in hotels, restaurants, gift shops and other nongovernment facilities run as private concessions on park property. Park Service spokesman David Barna said that "in theory," guns could be carried inside those facilities, including dormitories where young, seasonal employees stay.
"The burden is on the public to not only know state law but know what state you're in," Barna said. He noted that the Appalachian Trail runs through nine states from Georgia to Maine and across a patchwork of attitudes toward guns. Yellowstone sprawls across three states, while Great Smoky Mountains comes under the laws of Tennessee and North Carolina.
Park employees are undergoing training on local laws. Barna said some staff have expressed fears for their safety -- until now, anyone carrying a weapon could be arrested by park police. But others, especially staffers in the West, are more comfortable with the idea. Most, however, "would prefer not to deal with this," he said.
Barna doubts many of the park system's 275 million annual visitors will come toting heat this summer, when the peak vacation period begins. But he does expect the first few months under the new rule to bring "people who want to express their Second Amendment right to bear arms" and plenty of macho photo ops by park entrance signs.
Even if few park visitors flaunt their firearms, knowing the person next to your family at an evening campfire or on a ranger-led hike might have a gun will have a chilling effect, critics say.
"Visitors come to the parks to try to leave behind their day-to-day worries," said Scot McElveen, president of the Association of National Park Rangers. "Some of that escapism is from worrying about crime or guns."
The ban on firearms dates back before 1916, when the national park system was founded to protect the country's wildlife as much as its wilderness. Even President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid hunter, wasn't exempt from the prohibition when he visited Yellowstone, then run by the army, in 1903.
According to historian Douglas Brinkley's "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America," the park's superintendent "issued a stern statement declaring that the president's gun would be sealed by the U.S. Army when he entered the park, just as with every other citizen."
"It was a zone dedicated to the preservation of nature," Brinkley told AOL News. "In the same way that you don't carry a gun to an airport, there are places where you don't carry a gun in this country, and a national park is one."
