Category: Gun Rights

The Ohio legislature is looking to fix this issue as we speak, but an Ohio Court of Common Pleas has found that non-violent misdemeanants, in this case people who have had a misdemeanor drug conviction in their past, can’t be stripped of Second Amendment rights. It’s interesting that the holding is limited to self-defense. Does that mean if he had firearms for hunting that might be a problem? That sure seems to turn the “sporting purposes” language in the federal gun control act on its head, doesn’t it?

Apparently his gun registry system, meant to tell first responders how many guns are in any given house, isn’t operational and he’s pissed. It’s a well known fact, after all, that armed robbers, violent gang members, and drug dealers register their firearms with police. All this is going to do is get innocent gun owners killed when the police feel the need to send in an armed SWAT team with itchy trigger fingers because Joe Gun Owner, who has an “arsenal” of a few pistols and a shotgun, ended up with a warrant out on him because of a traffic summons he forgot about a few years ago.

Looks like they managed a successful discharge petition in the Ohio house, advancing several pro-gun measures. But the Democratic Speaker, who is against these measures, may be able to thwart a vote.

It used to be in lame duck sessions of any given legislature in this country, that’s when you had to worry about the knives coming out from the anti-gun forces. It was a great time to get a controversial gun control bill through when the consequences has already been decided in the previous election. New Jersey, particularly, is famous for lame duck anti-gun bills. Now it seems that we’re going the opposite direction in Ohio:

One bill, Senate Bill 239, would allow permit holders to carry concealed guns in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. It also would loosen restrictions on how guns must be carried in vehicles. It was opposed by a number of major state law-enforcement associations, but Gov. Ted Strickland said this summer that he would sign it.

The other, Senate Bill 247, would allow people with certain misdemeanor drug convictions to carry guns.

SB 247 is being mischaracterize here, and has more to do with prohibited persons under Ohio law than it does with carry in particular. Currently any drug conviction at all makes you a prohibited person, not just for carry, but for possession as well. This would up the requirement so that the drug conviction would have to be a felony. The bill would still prohibit someone who is an unlawful user or dependent on drugs or alcohol from possessing or carrying a firearm. The bill only gives relief to someone who is denied because they may have had a misdemeanor drug conviction in their past. The bill also changes the application for relief from disability somewhat, presumably to cover someone who may have been adjudicated an addict or drunkard, but who has gotten clean.

But it’s interesting that now we’re running pro-gun stuff in lame duck legislatures rather than the other way around.

From the Philly Inquirer. It almost seems like Harold Jackson is afraid to say too many good things about her, but what tripped over my alerts was this passage:

Rice’s recollection of events that night comes pretty close to my own, although we were in different households. “The men of the community took up their neighborhood watch,” she said. Rice explained that these watches had begun months earlier, after homes and churches were bombed.

She said that when her father was on watch, he would sit on the porch with a “gun on his lap . . . looking for white night riders.” Because of that experience, seeing her father take up a weapon to protect his family, Rice said, she was “a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.”

My father and other men in our housing project also armed themselves to protect us after Sixteenth Street Baptist was bombed. That never made me want to join the NRA. But as I said, my life and Rice’s were very different. The little gun violence I saw as a teenager convinced me that it should be harder to get a gun.

Except it it had been harder to get a gun, you can bet the hoops one had to jump through would be enforced vigorously against the black community, while the Klan would have had all the guns they want. What few gun control laws exist in this country were mostly targeted at disarming minorities. Read the whole article. It’s quite good.