Take a breath, would you?

I'm talking to you, the reporter who's looking to write your story about the murder of Rainier National Park Ranger Margaret Anderson. Yes, it's true that a little over a year after firearms were legally permitted in national parks, a park ranger was shot and killed. And it's true that it's not common for federal law enforcement to be killed. (In the decade from 1997 through 2006 for example, only 15 of the 562 cops feloniously killed* were federal law enforcement.)

But trying to link the permission of guns in the parks with Ranger Anderson's slaying is ridiculous.

Benjamin Colton Barnes, the shooter in this case, was already on the lam for having been involved in a shooting of 4 people south of Seattle.  He apparently fled to what he considered to be a good hidey-hole: Rainier National Park. In fact, that's an exceptionally stupid place to go, because it is patrolled by rangers (a national forest would have made a lot more sense) and he stuck out when he tried to pass through a controlled access point. When they tried to stop him, he ran (yet another violation of the law), and when they tried to roadblock him, he shot at the pursuing law enforcement officers (a final violation of the law), killing one.

Does any part of this story suggest that, prior to 2010, Barnes would have uttered the following sentence to himself?

"Whatever I do, I mustn't enter the confines of any property owned by the National Park Service system! They've got laws forbidding firearms, there!!!"

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*Aside from the 9/11/2001 attack.