It's a scary time to be living in Dick Cheney's America. And in Bob Taft's Ohio.
Congress will soon reconsider the federal assault weapons ban signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, which is set to expire next year. According to Bob Herbert's column in Monday's New York Times, the National Rifle Association and the gun industry are pressing lawmakers to let the ban die - in fact, industry advocates hope it won't even come up for a vote.
Closer to home, the Ohio General Assembly also is on the watch list of fear. This term or next, legislators could reconsider some form of House Bill 12, abandoned earlier this year, a law that would allow qualified Ohio citizens to carry concealed weapons. The gun industry and National Rifle Association have been pushing concealed carry in Ohio for quite some time, and were not dissuaded by a state Supreme Court ruling that the state's ban was constitutional. HB 12 came close to passing during the end of the last session in June, but gun advocates could not agree with Taft on a compromise that would have allowed drivers to keep easily accessible handguns in their car glove boxes.
This Sunday, people in Toledo, Manchester and Cleveland will stage concealed carry walks
in which gun owners will parade around with their guns in the open, supposedly having cleared it with local police. Local law enforcement organizations have been informed of organizers' intentions to hold safe events and are encouraged to attend reads the Web site of Ohioans For Concealed Carry (http://www.ofcc.net).
Last Saturday, amid local Girl Scout troops and skiers being pulled over the bricks on Court Street, the Ohio University Second Amendment Club passed in review at the OU Homecoming Parade. Its offering was a white pickup truck with two men sitting on the bed, each holding what I sincerely hope were just a realistic-looking replica of an
M-16 assault rifle.
Gun advocates are organized and dedicated; they're sanctimonious zealots with a selective, Talmudic interpretation of the Constitution and sympathetic friends in Washington and Columbus. They want everyone to be able to buy a pistol and carry it at all times. They want to be able to buy high-powered sniper rifles - of the type military sharp-shooters use for long-range battlefield pickoffs - to hunt deer. They want Kalishnikov assault rifles with 30-round banana clips, Tec-9 submachine guns like the ones used by the shooters at Columbine High School in 2001, and they want quick access to virtually any kind of weapon while in the driver's seat of a car.
The NRA won't call one of the fact sheets on its Web site (http://www.nraila.com/FactSheets.asp?FormMode=Detail&ID=15) an enemies list
but darn if it isn't a long list of organizations and people that favor gun registration laws. Herbert mentioned in his column that he found his own name on the list, along with other disparate groups like the National Organization of Police Associations and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. Herbert quotes an NRA spokesman who told him that members could use the information at their own discretion.
These people terrify me.
When The Post ran an editorial opposing HB 12, it contained an imaginary worst-case scenario that involved a shootout between armed bank robbers and customers, which immediately provoked a letter to the editor from a pro-gun reader. The hypothetical bloodbath was just hype
and rhetoric
it said (conservatives often use the word rhetoric as a pejorative, the way Ronald Reagan used to say liberal or gubbment). If the ignorant editorial board would only have considered the facts about neighboring states with concealed carry laws, it would realize the truth that gun states are utopian, crime-free paradises, where responsible, armed citizens keep criminals from showing their faces.
The problem is, the worst-case scenarios don't even make the headlines anymore. A chilling side effect of competing international stories and the 24-hour news cycle is that workplace shootings, which only a few years ago drew national attention, warrant only brief mentions in newscasts and newspapers these days. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration estimates that every year nearly 1,000 people are murdered and another 1.5 million assaulted at work. But that's not all that's worrisome: After a high-pressure day in the corporate rat race, do we want to be stuck in traffic with people who have semiautomatic weapons in their car?
- Ewing is The Post's state senior writer. E-mail him at Philip.ewing@ohiou.edu.
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Philip Ewing
