On July 16, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 9719, the Federal Lands Lawful Carry Act, with Texas Rep. Pat Fallon. It went to the Judiciary Committee. It has three cosponsors.

The bill would let people carry firearms inside buildings on federal lands — visitor centers, ranger stations, and the other public facilities run by the National Park Service and other federal land agencies, plus U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facilities.

Yakym's case for it:

"Hoosiers who can lawfully carry shouldn't lose that right when they step into a federal park building."

Fallon's was broader: "Americans' Second Amendment rights are under assault, and we in Congress must do all we can to ensure that they retain their God given right to bear arms."

The bill is endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation.

What the law actually is right now

It's worth being precise, because the framing of this bill depends on you not knowing the current rule.

You can already carry a gun in a national park. That changed in 2010. As the Park Service explains it, people who can lawfully possess firearms under federal and state law may possess them in the park. Trails, campgrounds, overlooks, roads — all of it.

The single remaining restriction is buildings. Under 18 U.S.C. § 930, a firearm can't be carried into a federal facility, and every one of those buildings is posted with the same sign:

"Federal law prohibits the possession of a firearm or other dangerous weapon in this Federal facility unless specifically authorized."

Within the park system, "federal facility" means the staffed buildings: government offices, visitor centers, ranger stations, fee collection buildings, maintenance facilities. Rooms with employees in them.

So the "right" Yakym describes as being lost isn't the right to carry in a national park. It's already there. What his bill changes is the last few hundred square feet — the room with the ranger behind the desk.

Who is in that room

This is where the bill stops being abstract.

A 2022 report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, covered by E&E News, documented what has been happening to that workforce:

• 228 threats and assaults on NPS law enforcement personnel in 2019 — more than double the 94 recorded the year before
• Violent crimes in the parks up from 60 in 2014 to 293 in 2019
• Permanent law enforcement rangers down 15% between 2005 and 2021; seasonal rangers down 30%
• U.S. Park Police at a nearly 50-year staffing low

PEER's director summed it up: "The thin green line of park law enforcement rangers is being stretched to the breaking point."

Those are the people Yakym's bill affects. Not hikers on a trail — hikers on a trail can already carry. The staff standing at a counter, in a building with no metal detector and no armed security, telling visitors that the campsite is full, that the permit is denied, that the fee is due, that they have to leave.

Fewer of them every year. More assaults on the ones who remain. And a bill to remove the one place their building is legally off-limits to a firearm.

The bill's real audience

The tell is who wrote the argument.

In March 2026, months before Yakym filed his bill, the Second Amendment Foundation — one of the three groups endorsing it — sued to strike down the very same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 930(a), as applied to Park Service facilities. Their complaint, filed with the Firearms Policy Coalition, argues it is unconstitutional to make someone disarm to walk into a visitor center and pick up a camping permit.

SAF's founder Alan Gottlieb was explicit about the broader target:

"These so-called 'sensitive places' restrictions across the country are nothing more than an attempt by idealogues to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling in Bruen."

Yakym's bill is the legislative version of that lawsuit. If the court won't do it, Congress does it instead — and the sponsor gets endorsements from all three of the groups pushing both tracks.

His record on this isn't new

This fits a pattern that predates the parks bill.

In September 2023, Yakym was an original cosponsor of H.R. 5561, a bill "to prohibit the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services from declaring certain emergencies or disasters for the purpose of imposing gun control" — permanently barring a future public health emergency, a pandemic among them, from ever being used to restrict firearms.

Meanwhile, in the state he represents: Indiana has about 17.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 34% above the national average, roughly 1,200 Hoosiers a year.

Yakym has not introduced a bill about that number. He has introduced one about visitor center doors.

He's not alone in this session

The 119th Congress has produced a run of bills that take the last remaining restricted spaces and open them.

In Colorado, Jeff Crank wrote a bill to make it easier to bring personal guns onto military bases — the opposite of what the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee recommended, in a service where two-thirds of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. In North Carolina, Richard Hudson's national concealed carry bill drew a plea from the Fraternal Order of Police to kill it, because it strips officers of the power to check a permit. In Texas, Ken Paxton spent two years suing to put guns back into the State Fair after a shooting there injured three people, and lost to an all-Republican court.

Every one of these takes the same shape: find a place where guns are still restricted, and argue that the restriction is the anomaly.

The question nobody gets to ask him

If a constituent thought the ranger at the front desk of a visitor center should not have to wonder who's armed, there isn't much they can do about it.

Yakym has not held a public town hall. When hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office in March 2025 asking for one, he called them "individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." What he offers instead is staff-run "mobile office hours," and his own office says those "are not town halls."

The NRA got a say in this bill. Gun Owners of America got a say. The Second Amendment Foundation got a say.

The rangers didn't. Neither did we.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP lawmakers want to allow guns in federal park buildings — E&E News by POLITICO, July 2026, and Congressmen Yakym, Fallon introduce bill to end Federal Ban on Firearms in Federal Park Buildings — GIANT fm. Bill status from congress.gov. Ranger staffing and assault figures from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, as reported by E&E News. Photo: official congressional portrait.