Roy Blunt: “I want to talk about the bill that we are considering this week. This is a bill that for sportsmen and for those who are…”

“I want to talk about the bill that we are considering this week. This is a bill that for sportsmen and for those who are interested in public lands is going to have a big impact. It will have big benefits for our country and big benefits for my State of Missouri. This package includes a number of important provisions to expand hunting and fishing access--something that, I think, every Congress, over a handful of Congresses now, has tried to do and failed to do. It has provisions to protect natural resources and provisions to improve public lands. In my State of Missouri, we have more than 1.2 million hunters and fishermen. They spend about $1.67 billion annually and support almost 30,000 jobs in our State. For the first time, this bill makes it clear in statute that all Bureau of Land Management and National Forest System lands will be open to hunting, to recreational shooting, and to fishing unless they are explicitly closed. They can be closed, but they have to be explicitly closed for safety reasons or other justified reasons that are established not just by the Bureau of Land Management or by the National Forest System but through a public process. In other words, they are going to be open unless they are closed instead of the current situation of their being closed unless they are open.…”