06Spet18e guntotingliberals re roadless areas
I just spent a few minutes looking at the American
Hunters and Shooters Association website and think I
should mention something that may not be well known to
some guntotingliberals. The website mentions efforts
to preserve “roadless” areas in the United States,
presumably to keep them pristine for such uses as
hunting. I think almost any reasonable American
(unless your definition of reasonable includes those
who think that any and every natural resource exists
only for exploitation by the wealthy) would agree that
roadless areas ought to be protected and preserved.
The problem is that many areas are being described as
“roadless” where roads, by any reasonable definition,
have existed for decades.
We moved to Utah in 1982 and have had camped and
picnicked in hundreds of locations in Utah and a few
places in surrounding states. Many of the roads we
have used in the past are now closed to the public.
One example is a road which was closed within the last
year. We had used that road several times, but our
two-year-old granddaughter had never been to the end
of that road, a place I call the Wild Horse Overlook.
I’m 62 and arthritic, so by the time Morgan is old
enough to hike there, I probably will not be able to
do so.
It won’t be the end of the world if I never get to
visit the Wild Horse Overlook with our granddaughter,
but perhaps you can sense the ache in my heart with
regard to the prospect of probably never being able to
do so.
The problem has to do with wordcrafting. Even in the
conservative a state of Utah, the legal definition of
a road, in state law, includes that it is a route open
to the public. If or when a similar inane definition
is used by federal land use agencies, the roads in a
given area are no longer roads (by that definition)
when the area is closed to motor vehicles. So the
public and members of Congress are duped into thinking
that a “roadless” area is an area where there are no
roads. Let’s say, for example, that an area is closed
to the public as a “Wilderness Study Area”. The law
specifically prohibits such a designation for an area
with roads, so you have to designate the area as a
“Wilderness Study Area” by simply ignoring the
existence of the roads in the area. Congress
designated many such areas without adequate
information about them, thinking that it was an
emergency provision which could be easily reversed if
“study” revealed that the areas were not true
“wilderness” areas. But once the designations were
made, the Wilderness Study Areas, were “roadless” by
the definition that the roads were no longer open to
the public (and by several other, equally inane
definitions).
If some guntotingliberals are devoted to closing
existing roads on public land, they might not care
about this. Some may even rejoice that a way has been
found to close the existing roads.
It might be well, however, to consider that in the
past, gun owners in several western states could, in a
single day, drive to places where shooting on public
land would neither bother nor endanger anyone. As
more and more of those places are closed, those
opportunities for shooting are also reduced.
In attempting to protect “roadless” areas, just be
careful to investigate what definition of “roadless”
is being used.



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