It's the lead

Glenn Reynolds (in full):

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT defends Bush rule on guns. “The Obama administration is legally defending a last-minute rule enacted by President George W. Bush that allows concealed firearms in national parks, even as it is internally reviewing whether the measure meets environmental muster.” Good for them. Hard to imagine a serious environmental objection to the rule, though.

Well, it's the fact that bullets contain lead, in fact, most bullets are nothing but lead. What else could an "environmental muster" be? (Lead shot is already banned for waterfowl hunting.)

Or, just as good - the guns will be banned "for the sake of the children." Firearms will be denounced as an environmental hazard to children.

Surely, Don, you overreach, you may say? Well, no. Keeping lead away from children is one of bureaucracy's favorite duties now. Consider this headline: "Lead Ban Stops Youth ATV and Motorcycle Sales," written on Feb. 2:

[T]he Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, enacted August 14 of last year, will go into effect [on Feb. 10] and ban all products designed for children ages 12 or under which contain lead over specified limits. ...

What exactly happens on Feb 10 for motorcycle dealers? "On February 10 large inventories of motorcycle and ATV products that present no health risk to children could be rendered retroactively illegal and future products prohibited from sale. These products may need to be destroyed resulting in severe hardship for dealers and manufacturers in the motorcycle industry. Along with the current state of the economy, this may be a hit that dealers and manufacturers will not be able to recover from."

But wait, there's more. City Journal on, "The New Book Banning":

[U]nder a law [the same one -- DS] Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

That's the tack that the Obama administration will take: it's the lead that's the problem, so guns must be banned from federal lands. This is not a new tactic, of course, since opponents of Second Amendment rights have long tried to shut down firearms use by trying to cripple ammunition makers and users with absolute liability for ammunition use. It won't matter, either, that ammunition without any lead at all is available on the civilian market. A way will be found, a reason will be given. The present "defense" of the Bush rule is just theater.