Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times celebrated PSH Day with a story titled “Guns are now permitted — but not necessarily welcomed — in national parks.” In its usual vein of editorializing while pretending to report the news, the story tells us that “the controversial law” (which was so damned controversial it sailed through a solidly Democrat Congress by a veto-proof majority, and was signed into law by the only President in history with a public record in support of banning handguns) took effect yesterday and now:

Visitors now can pack heat in any national park from Gates of the Arctic to Everglades, provided they comply with the firearms laws of the park’s home state[.]

Meaning, of course, if you are one of the three people who can legally carry a firearm in California, now you can carry at Yosemite, too. Yippee!

But opponents say guns don’t belong in the nation’s highly protected parks, where it remains illegal to fire a weapon or kill an animal and where employees, including most rangers, are unarmed.

The presence of guns, they say, could increase the chance of deadly accidents and up the ante in confrontations between park visitors or between visitors and wildlife.

Not a single opponent is cited by name, leading one to wonder whether the unnamed opponents consist of Ms. Cart herself, and maybe a few co-workers at the L.A. Times. Or maybe herself and Paul Helmke d/b/a The Brady Center To Prevent Gun Violence. He … um, I mean, they … can be relied on to say those things, and it only takes two to justify the use of the plural, so there we are.

The law, passed by Congress in May, reverses 94 years of National Park Service policy that generally allowed visitors to transport unloaded, disassembled weapons in the trunks of their cars.

Really! I knew it felt like 94 years since the Reagan Administration but had no idea it really had been that long. Where does the time go?

Weapons won’t be allowed in buildings where federal employees work, such as the Statue of Liberty and park visitors centers.

Bummer for Howard Stern and the two other guys who can carry a firearm in NYC. To everyone else, fuhgeddaboudit. If you can’t carry in Manhattan, you couldn’t carry at the Statue of Liberty even if the new rule did apply there.

Returning to manufactured-controversy-mode, Cart writes:

Critics, however, say there are as many potential complications as there are state and local gun laws.

Oh goody, now are we going to hear from an actual … um … critic?

David Barna, a National Park Service spokesman, said park websites are providing some guidance to visitors, but it is the responsibility of each gun owner to understand the laws of the state they are visiting.

Ouch, that was some scathing criticism there. Gun owners responsible for understanding the laws of the state they visit! Take that, gun lobby.

That could confuse visitors at the more than 30 national parks that span more than one state. The Appalachian Trail crosses 14 states. And though Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming, parts of the world’s first national park also straddle the borders of Montana and Idaho, each of which has different weapons laws.

Wow, I’m so, like, confused. You mean to say that Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are three individual, like, states? They’re all right to carry states, and they all recognize each other’s permits and the most common out of state ones (e.g., Utah and Florida), the only question is which of them recognize permits from your state. So yes, you should check up on that before you travel, but the good news is that Wyoming, which is probably the first state you think about planning the trip, is also the one least likely to recognize your permit. If they do recognize it, chances are Idaho and Montana do, too (but look it up!).

Implementing the law will be particularly hard in California, which has more national park units than any other state and some of the nation’s most restrictive firearms laws.

Yeah, enforcing state law as written is so, like, hard! Jeebus.

Officials are scrambling to fully comprehend how the law will play out at national park units in California, from Redwood and Presidio, to Death Valley and Joshua Tree.

Scramble no more: just read your own state’s damned laws. That’s how the new federal law will play out in your state. Duh.

“Many of the details of the law are unknown at this time,” said Deputy California Atty. Gen. Alison Merrilees. “It won’t be crystal clear the day the law goes into effect.”

Or until someone in California bothered to actually read the law, whichever came first. Apparently the former.

Chicago Magazine Senior Editor Jennifer Tanaka openly admits to having been a “a rank amateur trying desperately to come to grips with constitutional law” while putting together this factually-challenged write-up on the McDonald plaintiffs. What I want to know is, for all the cases of journalists in over their heads on legal issues, why on earth would a publication leave it up to someone who admits to being in over their heads?

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for giving Patterico another year’s worth of mockworthy material. That craptastic year 2009 won’t be fully over until you RTWT.

John McCormick of Bloomberg “News” has an uncommonly silly piece on the poor, downtrodden gun-grabbers whose continuing efforts to blame the gun lobby for the failures of their own unconstitutional gun ordinance are being largely ignored. I counted five flat-out lies in the article, which are in addition to the overall whiny tone, but what I’d really like to know is, does writing for Bloomberg actually require the reporter to be as obnoxious as Bloomberg himself?

UPDATE: Insty has more. Or less, actually, unless less is more, in which case he does have more.

Any media types care to explain how they decide which criminals get to own their aliases and which ones don’t? I ask because I can’t recall a single news article about “Clark Rockefeller” (Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter) that didn’t have his moniker in scare quotes, nor can I recall a single article about “Sarah Jane Olson” (Kathleen Soliah) that did.

I’m as happy as the next guy to see Creigh Deeds trounce Terry “I’m a Virginian” McAuliffe, but I could really do without a subpar editorial disguised as news reporting:
 

Only toward the end of the campaign, after Deeds began surging in polls, did his two opponents take aim at him for Senate votes against efforts to close a loophole in state laws that exempt firearms sales at gun shows from the background checks required of federally licensed gun retailers.

 
Note that the Ass. Press didn’t say Moran and McAuliffe accused Deeds of voting against laws to change a law they called a loophole that supposedly exempted firearms sales at gun shows from regulation.  That statement may very well be true.  In fact, given the track record of that weasel McAuliffe, it almost certainly is true.  However, it is not true that any federal or state law, voted on by Deeds or not, exempts firearms sales at gun shows from anything.  Federal law requires background checks for all retail handgun purchases, and so does Virginia.  Federal law does not require background checks for any private handgun purchases, and neither does Virginia.  Federal law does not treat a sale any differently based on whether it does or does not occur at a gun show, and neither does Virginia.  A decent argument can be made that private sales that happen to occur at gun shows should be regulated as though they were retail sales (I’ve offered qualified support for this view myself in the past), but it’s hardly a slam dunk.  Certainly not the slam dunk it would have to be to justify using such a loaded word as “loophole” in a news story.

I don’t know much. I don’t know too much, but I know this: stuff is messed up.

Via commenter Trained Dog, it’s amazing how the L.A. Times can publish this without even mentioning this.

If you’re one of the three people on the planet who reads this blog but not Patterico’s, read this.

Hillary Clinton Tamara Dietrich of the Newport News Daily Press pokes fun at gun owners who think Barack Obama is not a friend of gun owners.

A black man gets elected president and half the country dives for the panic room, buying up guns and squirreling away supplies like fatalists awaiting the End of Days. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Barack Obama is biracial, not black.

Lovely of Ms. Dietrich to bring up race in an article on guns, or for that matter, any other topic except … um … race. I know plenty of gun owners who fear new restrictions on their right to own or carry guns. I also know plenty of gunophobes who think guns are icky, can’t imagine why an sane person would want to own one, and would be delighted to see government take everyone else’s guns away. I do not know a single individual, however, who is in favor of having his guns taken away from a white guy, but opposed to having them taken away from a black guy. Do you? Does Dietrich? If not, what the hell point is there in bringing race up?

Further, even if race were a legitimate topic of discussion in this context, the notion that Obama’s white mother precludes him from being “black” is evidence that the infamous “one drop rule” never really went away, it just came full circle. In the days of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood meant you were black. Now, per Ms. Dietrich, one drop of white blood apparently means you can’t be. Query how many American blacks meet Ms. Dietrich’s definition of “black.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know why the average African-American has a lighter complexion than the average African-African. But I digress.

“Hee hee heeeee …” chortles “HG Robinson” in the very first post to reporter Peter Dujardin’s story last week on the local run on weaponry. “Clearly President Obama is looking to ban handguns and close loopholes in the law first chance he can. … You gun nuts better stock up now.”

First, Obama hasn’t said he wants to ban handguns.

His former colleague John Lott begs to differ on that, but just for grits and shins, let’s go Lambert on the guy and assume he’s lying. For all you or I know, maybe Obama never really did say he wanted to ban handguns. He did, however, write that he did, nodded when asked if he did, voted against the law stripping his home town and a few suburbs of their “right” to perosecute homeowners who use otherwise lawfully owned handguns in otherwise lawful self defense, refused to sign the Heller brief supporting a common-senes reading of the Second Amendment (or even the wishy-washy brief offered by the Bush Administration) and appointed Eric Holder, who had signed a different Heller brief advocating the “collective” (read: no) rights interpretation, a view too extreme even for the four dissenting Justices in that case. So pardon me when I refuse to take an ounce of solace from the fact that Obama supposedly never came out and said “I hereby want to ban handguns.” To the extent that actions speak louder than words, he screamed it.
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