Residents with concealed weapons permits can now carry their guns into Cape Hatteras National Seashore and the Smoky Mountains National Park.

The U.S. Department of Interior issued new rules today allowing guns into national parks and wildlife refuges if residents also have concealed weapons permits in the state where the parks are located.
Previous regulations prevented firearms in national parks, even when a carrier held a concealed weapon permit, Barb Barrett reports.

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican and a hunter, was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing for change. He had co-sponsored legislation that would have allowed guns in parks.

"This is just to allow law-abiding citizens to continue to carry their weapon while they're in the national park, when the state allows them to carry anyway," said Burr spokesman Chris Walker.

The new rules do not allow target practice or the carrying of weapons into federal buildings.

U.S. senators often move through the hallways undisturbed in office buildings around Capitol Hill, joined only by staffers as they stride purposefully en route to hearings and votes.

But when Sen. Elizabeth Dole slipped out of a hearing on Cape Hatteras National Seashore today, she was — by government-fandom standards —mobbed, Barb Barrett reports.

Two wide-eyed young Senate staffers, a middle-aged visitor in a wheelchair and T-shirt-and-shorts-clad tourist with his son all lined up for attention. They carried miniature point-and-shoot cameras, clutched pens for autographs and asked a reporter to take their picture with the senator.

Dole accommodated them one by one, grinning broadly as she signed autographs in her neat, cursive script.

She admired the magazine cover one man brought showing her and Sen. Bob Dole. "My, look at my husband!" she said, beaming.

"Wow," she added, looking around at her fans, "there's a lot going on here."