Political Quotes

“A couple of years ago I added an amendment in our deliberative process that gave Americans their constitutional rights in the U.S. National Forest. There were two main reasons I did that. No. 1, the amount of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults were rising; and No. 2, there is some confusion with the conceal and carry State laws. We have 35 or 36 States that have conceal and carry State laws, but when someone accidentally walks onto U.S. forest land, they are actually violating Federal law even though they might not know they are on State land versus Federal land. I would note that since that time the amount of crime in our national parks has declined. So since then, we now have, throughout the country, the same approach we have in national parks on the Bureau of Land Management areas, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the National Wildlife Refuge. The reason this is important for the Corps of Engineers is because after we passed those amendments, the corps proactively stated that none of this applied to them. Well, the fact is the corps has more visitors every year on their 422 lake and river projects, 11.7 million acres, 95,000 camp sites, and 6,500 miles of trails, and they have more than 370 million visitors. Corps projects are the most visited of any single Federal agency sites--even more than the 280 million annual visitors to our national parks.…”