Ohio is a state that has seen more than its share of military sacrifice. The reminders are all around us: the gravestones, memorial highway signs, observances for those lost in combat, including the 2005 casualties suffered in Iraq by the Brook Park-based 3/25th Marine reservists. But long before, this state, settled in part by Revolutionary War veterans, found itself on the front lines of the War of 1812, and of the Civil War, weaving military service into the state’s history, and its family traditions. Ohio also remains a largely rural state, where agriculture is part of the economy’s lifeblood, and hunting a seasonal pleasure.
Which is all to say that Ohioans love their guns — for safety, for recreation, for the turkey hunting.
But the distortions this has caused in public policy, the mania in the Ohio Statehouse to make Ohio a free-fire zone where gun sales are encouraged and may soon be subsidized by eliminating the state sales tax on guns and ammo, where virtually anyone can carry concealed weapons virtually anywhere (except into the Statehouse), is now leading to a rising number of unnecessary deaths in urban, and rural Ohio.
Even commonsense gun restrictions — like background checks, red-flag laws to remove weapons from those not equipped to use them safely, gun-safe storage laws to keep the little kids from killing one another — are shunned at a Statehouse beholden to the gun lobby and dominated by rural interests.
But it’s in no one’s interest to make it easier for disturbed individuals to amass an arsenal and kill, whether it’s a sleeping family in Piketon or the innocent bystanders being wounded in gun battles in Greater Cleveland.
It’s gotten so bad that even the experts aren’t listened to anymore in Columbus — not the police groups vainly urging legislators not to eliminate concealed-carry permits last year; not the prosecutors warning against Ohio’s reversal of the burden proof in self-defense shooting claims in 2019 and expansion of its ”stand your ground” law in 2021.
The results should have been anticipated — surging gun violence in Ohio’s cities, and reduced gun-violence arrests. And in Cuyahoga County, “the new laws have dissuaded the prosecutor’s office from seeking indictments in about 12 to 15 homicide cases each year, cleveland.com’s John H. Tucker recently reported, citing Saleh Awadallah, who oversees the office’s homicide investigations.
The city’s gun-violence stats also tell the story:
“After falling in 2022, felonious assaults with guns are up more than 7% in (Cleveland) this year, according to Cleveland police,” Tucker reports. “In the division’s Second District, which covers the city’s near West Side, including Old Brooklyn, the jump is 78%. At the same time, weapons arrests in Cleveland are down 40% from last year, likely due in part to an Ohio law that went into effect last June allowing anyone 21 and older to carry a concealed gun without a license, training or background check.”
The statewide trend, over the two decades since Ohio authorized the concealed carrying of firearms, is also daunting. The Health Policy Institute of Ohio, funded by a range of Ohio philanthropies, reported last year that, “in 1999, a firearm was used in 57% of (Ohio) homicides, and in 2020 that percentage increased to 82%.”
The interlocking problems of crime guns and gun violence are magnified in cities where gangs, poverty and opportunism ensnare too many young people in the gun culture and rule of the firearm. Inevitably, innocent people die in these shoot-outs.
Yet Ohio’s lawmakers, abetted by the Supreme Court in overriding the Ohio Constitution’s municipal home rule provisions, have handcuffed the state’s cities by prohibiting local gun laws, even those requiring safe storage of weapons.
That doesn’t serve the public interest and it snubs city and village residents who want to tailor local laws to local needs, including that most basic of political responsibilities, a community’s safety.
Ohio lawmakers profess to respect law enforcement and the sacrifice of police officers who put their lives on the line every day. If that were the case, they’d also respect their input on the dangerous results of this drive to find new ways to make guns easy to acquire, legal to conceal and easy to justify when used to kill.
Enough is enough. It’s time Ohio’s elected leaders see the truth — that their policies are leading to more gun deaths, not fewer — and move to end the gun deaths, defy the gun lobby and serve all the people of Ohio.
