California experimented with near simultaneous bans on carrying firearms in public parks, preserving mountain lion populations, and restricted deer hunting. The results were predictable to anyone except the city-dwelling hippies that voted for this perfect storm... At first it was just hikers and mountain bicyclists that started getting eaten when the cougar population soared, but then you started getting well fed mountain lions cruising populated areas looking for territory because other equally well fed mountain lions had pushed them out of their territory. See, a starving mountain lion and a well fed mountain lion both want the same amount of territory. More cats = more territory covered. Oops.
My dad had to respond to a number of calls (as a CHP officer) to deal with mountain lions that had been hit by cars on major highways. Many of them survived the impact, leading to injured and pissed off cats wandering through residential areas. Not good.
I think CA lost an appeal for the gun carry laws, not sure though. And I also think ranchers started being allowed to shoot cats again.
Gotta call a little streching on this, man. But if you care or desire to discover the devil within the details then I'll try my best to quickly indulge. There's a lot of things here in California that doesn't originate from any of the hippies, but that they enthusiaticaly jump aboard the bandwagon for once it is put out there. One of them was the firearms ban in the state parks, that was the brain child of our state's fine State Parks and Law Enforcement unions.
Never been a ban on shooting a big cat in CA (or, as this stuck-in-the-city dwelling Californian will point out to a proud gun-totin _Texan_, any critter in any US state that I can think of) directly threateneing you or your property/livestock. You've always been able to get a permit/permission from a CA Fish and Game warden to shoot a mountain lion (or bear) that was regularly wandering too close for compfort too.
Mountain Lion conservation was really just making it so that you had to have a reason to shoot a cougar, as before anyone wandering through the woods or mountains that would stumble across one, a threat or not, would take shots at it without any repricutions. Before there was _no_ regulation, so people would shoot one for just seeing it along the side of a road or go out and poach 12 of them in a month, and there was no law or punishment for these trigger happy gun owners and poachers. What the law did was pretty much make it so there is never a hunting season on cougar, and if you shoot one without viable permission or without cause you go to jail now.
No firearms in our state parks, unless you have a CC permit, is common sence and I think you're going to agree with me or at least see the logic behind it once I point out a couple quick points you are probabley unaware of.
A) Most CA State Parks (that are not beaches... but we'll get to that in the next point) were private ranches or land holdings donated to the state over the past 100 or so years. A few of these ranches and large holdings of land were donated to the state with clauses from the donor that the land be used for public recreation and conservation, and specificaly not hunting. The feds were unable to make those kind of guarentees, the California State Parks system on the other hand could and soon found itself a rather signifigant land owner as it racked up donation after donation from Hollywood industry types and others that wanted to see their land go to public use and recreation, without Bambi's mother being or father being hunted down (back "in the day" CA had a lot of private deer hunting ranches outside of Los Angeles for the weekend vacationing Hollywooder. So it's not likely that they were strongly against hunting on the land these types would eventualy later donate to the State Parks, but rather were strong suporters and firm believers in regulating and heavily managing it as they were witnesses themselves to what happens when there is a lack or hunting regulation and how quickly a deer population can be overhunted to near extinction by the public in an small region without any regulation and lots of hunters. This is also where the strong belief comes from that lead-poisoning lead to the rapid demise of the California Condors since during this time weekend-hunters would venture out and shoot at anything for sport and not food, including condors themselves and many many creatures that they shot for sport, only to leave to rot and the condors would susequently eat the lead shot in the carcases. In actuality, the sudden lack of food source after the deer population's signifigant demise (as well as the simultaneous decline in other food sources thanks to man... but some of it is speculatory, as we don't really know how many year-round streams/rivers south of San Francisco had annual salmon and steelhead runs or how many fish were in the runs that got completely snubbed out with the construction of damns and irrigation projects built before the turn of the last century, and the Mexican government that occupied CA before that had even worse records to look through for those type of things) in combination with looking for new food sources that were heavily contaminated with the rampant use at the time of extremely harmful agricultural pesticides and poisons were the largest factors to the demise of the CA Condor.). And to make matters even more complicated, lots of no-hunting parks were starting to have wild hog and sheep problems, so how do you encourage hunting and culling of pests like them on land you agreed to never have hunters on in the name of conserving the natural wildlife and habitat?...
B) By acreage, the largest share of our state's parks lies on our state's long and expansive coastlines and beaches. California... Beaches... Sun... Fun.. and guns?... nope, definetley don't go together no matter how badly I dream of retireing one day with an ocean-front skeet range. Our beaches are reserved for public use and recreation without the threat of shooting the person sun bathing on the beach blanket down the beach from you. There are already enough problems on the beaches with drunks, random frisbee/beach-ball incidents and kicking of sand.
C) The largest problem though nowadays, and one that litteraly developed itself next to the State Parks, is that a vast majority of the State Parks that people wish to recreationaly use guns in on their weekend off (down here in the highly populated metropolitan area of Southern California) are now bordered if not completely surrounded by residential or commercial developments. This has made the almost undefendable argument in the courts now that a hunter or shooter can't fire his gun twords anything but the ground in these parks or risk the safety of the general public. Take a population density map and overlay it with one outlining the boundries and territories of our various state parks. You'll find, that with exception to the coast and beaches, a vast majority of state parks (usualy located on the borders or between private lands and federal lands) are right on the edge or in the middle of heavily populated areas.
So, the solution was to ban all guns for any use in the parks while also having in the fine print on the ballot to allow special permit hunts of animals that threaten the health and conservation of native habitat and species in parks that could feasibley and safely (and economicaly) host hunts on an individual basis. So now as it is unless you have a permit or specific permision to have a gun or hunt on state park property, you have absolutely no reason or buisness bringing a gun to our parks.
Now, this is just the California State Parks, these no firearm regulations have no impact on the more ruraly located and plentiful amounts of BLM lands and federal forests we have within our state as well. So it's not like you have no place to go if you live here in the mtropolis of So-Cal. You just can't go to the state park that's a 5-15 minute drive from your home to plink cans or hunt some deer. You can go out to the high-dessert or mountains that are 50-90 minutes away and have yourself a good time though.
I am not a hippie, but I am a proud Californian that believes in eating what ya shoot and investing more in the environment than I take from it, and I think most of us are but have just gotten tired of explaining it all. Think about it, is it jsut easier and less trouble for you to all just call me a tree-hugging hippie and for me to just accept that than have to explain or write something as long as this post every time?
