Why It Matters: Federal public lands offer critical opportunities for sportsmen and women to participate in our time-honored traditions of hunting, fishing, trapping, and recreational shooting. Despite this, in late 2024, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sought to ban recreational shooting across the entirety of the 1.3-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument (BENM). Thanks to the efforts of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) and others who protested this proposal, the BLM has decided to reverse course and maintain recreational shooting access.
Highlights:
- In October of 2024, the Bureau of Land Management released a proposal for the Bears Ears National Monument that sought to prohibit recreational shooting within the entirety of the 1.3-million-acre monument.
- Following the proposal, the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation and others submitted a formal protest that expressed our concerns and the inconsistencies the proposal had with federal law.
- As a result, last week, the BLM decided to abandoned the proposal to ban recreational shooting in the BENM, which is a significant reversal and represents an important win for sportsmen and women.
Last week, the Bureau of Land Management published the final management plan for the Bears Ears National Monument, which importantly, maintains recreational shooting for sportsmen and women.
In 2019, the Dingell Act became law and included a longstanding CSF priority known as “Open Unless Closed”, which established guidance for the closure of federal public lands for hunting, fishing, recreational shooting, and other types of recreation. One of the most important provisions of the “Open Unless Closed” provision is that, when closing an area to the aforementioned activities, federal land closures must be “the smallest area for the least of amount of time that is required for public safety, administration, or compliance with applicable laws”. In this particular case, the proposal to close the entire BENM to recreational shooting ran completely counter to the “Open Unless Closed” requirement. As such, CSF fought this proposal and was successful in maintaining access for recreational shooting.
CSF is glad to see the BLM reverse their proposal and maintain recreational shooting opportunities for sportsmen and women within the BENM.
