Federal Suit Over Nevada’s State Parks Gun Ban

A Colorado legal foundation has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Nevada’s law that generally bans the possession of loaded guns in state parks.

Attorneys for the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver, along with Elko attorney Robert Salyer, filed suit in U.S. District Court for Nevada this week in behalf of Al Baker, an Idaho outdoorsman who said he was threatened with six months’ jail time if he fired his gun in Nevada state parks — even in self defense.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment applies to the states via the 14th Amendment makes it clear that the Nevada law is unconstitutional and must be stricken,” William Perry Pendley, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

A spokesman for the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, parent agency of the Nevada Division of State Parks, said the agency hadn’t seen the suit and had no immediate comment on it. State parks in the Las Vegas area are the Valley of Fire, Spring Mountain Ranch and Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort.

The Mountain States Legal Foundations says it is a nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government and economic freedom.

In announcing the Idaho lawsuit, Pendley cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling striking down a Chicago ordinance banning handgun ownership and finding “the right to keep and bear arms [is] among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.”-[source]