Bull's Eye

The Interior Department should reject a Bush administration effort to allow guns in national parks.

THE INTERIOR Department has until Monday to decide whether to defend or discard a federal rule passed late in the Bush administration to allow visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons. A federal judge found last month that the Bush administration had acted rashly in its zeal to enact the gun provision and temporarily put the rule on hold. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar should permanently reject the initiative.

Talk about an unnecessary, dangerous and just plain bad idea: National parks and refuges are among the safest, most beautiful places in the land. Crime rates in such locations are minuscule, especially in comparison with crime rates in more developed or urban areas, where people congregate in greater numbers. Risks posed by wild animals are just as small. If anything, the risks of accidental shootings of park users and the poaching of wildlife would increase if handguns were permitted on these public lands.

Making matters worse, the Bush administration appears to have flouted established federal procedures to rush this wrongheaded provision onto the books before it left office. For example, before implementing the rule, the Bush Interior Department failed to perform an environmental assessment, which calls for the government to take into account such factors as public safety and the "human environment." In granting a temporary injunction against the rule, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia took the administration to task for relying on what she called an "astoundingly flawed process."

The department should acknowledge, as the judge has made abundantly clear, that the rule was improperly promulgated. Mr. Salazar could then revoke the rule. He should do so -- and promptly.