by Karen Mehall Phillips, NRA Media - Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Amid the Biden administration’s attacks on our Second Amendment rights—a number of which resulted in the NRA filing lawsuits against it to keep our freedoms intact—we hunters and shooters enjoyed a brief reprieve on Jan. 17 when its U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) withdrew a controversial proposal to close the 1.3-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument (BENM) in Utah to recreational shooting.
Put forth in October 2024 as part of the Bears Ears National Monument Resource Management Plan, the proposal marked a massive overreach of regulatory authority. In addition to the shooting ban, it aimed to establish vehicle-access restrictions that would have hindered the use of the BENM for hunting while violating the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act.
Signed into law by President Trump in 2019, the act made it national policy for the BLM and U.S. Forest Service to consider hunting, fishing and recreational shooting (HFRS) opportunities as part of federal land, resource and travel management plans. It also declared it national policy that these agencies conserve and enhance the management of wild game species and their habitats—including through hunting and fishing in concert with state fish and game laws.
Those who have tracked the proposal’s progress will recall that on Nov. 1, 2024, the NRA and nine other hunter-backed organizations protested the new management plan and filed an appeal with the BLM. As the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) explained at the time, not only did the plan infringe on the rights of shooters and hunters for no reason, but it posed a threat to the wildlife conservation funding that their ongoing purchases of guns and ammunition provide as the Biden Administration continued to claim that “unsupported environmental impacts justified the drastic action.”