City leaders demand to be allowed to reinstate gun bans they rarely used

WBNS (CBS Columbus) is reporting that Columbus city officials are using the opportunity of the mass murder in a Parkland, FL high school to lobby for new gun control.

From the article:

Three Columbus city leaders have addressed a letter to Ohio Governor John Kasich, outlining their position on gun control.

The letter is signed by Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein, and Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin.

From the letter (which can be read in its entirety here):

After the federal assault weapon ban was allowed to expire in 2004, Columbus City Council passed legislation to regulate assault weapons. However, the Ohio General Assembly quickly reacted by stripping cities of the authority to enact laws that are in the best interest of families and first responders. Today, assault weapons are being used in Columbus and across the country to commit crimes of unfathomable violence.

Soon after passage of the 2004 Columbus "assault" weapons ban, which we dubbed the "Mentel Ban" after its sponsor, then-City Councilman Mike Mentel, Buckeye Firearms Association's Ken Hanson explained why local gun control laws such as these are meaningless.

Any criminal who violates the Mentel Ban will almost certainly have also violated another, felony level, law, rendering the Mentel Ban meaningless.

You might think “that can’t be right, no one would pass a law so meaningless.” Go look at the prosecution statistics for any municipality with misdemeanor gun laws. (i.e. magazine bans, AWBs, Saturday Night Special bans etc.) There are almost no prosecutions under these laws, because criminals almost ALWAYS do something felony level at the same time.

After reporting the fact that very few people complied with the ban's requirement to register their firearms, we recorded instances (see here and here, for example) of how ineffective the ban was at curbing crime in Columbus in the time before the law was overturned by House Bill 347.

Just how ineffective these bans are was also on display in Cleveland, where a public records request by Buckeye Firearms Association revealed some amazing data.

When Mayor Jackson took office in January of 2006, the City of Cleveland was enforcing a so-called "assault" weapons ban. With passage of HB 347 late that same year, both Cleveland's and Columbus' bans were rendered unenforceable. Jackson immediately set about to complain that he could no longer prosecute people for crimes committed with these guns, and that the loss of that tool had directly resulted in Cleveland’s increasing violent crime problem. The mayor even staged press conferences behind a table of scary-looking guns, implying that they had been confiscated through the now-defunct ban.

We challenged the media to investigate whether or not Jackson's claims were true. Getting the answer would be easy for a responsible journalist to do - if the city was having troubles prosecuting offenses in the absence of the ban, that would show through a significant drop in convictions related to those offenses. No one at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, or any other news organization, for that matter, took it upon themselves to investigate. So we did.

Public records requests by Buckeye Firearms Association revealed that in all of 2006, Jackson's first year in office, there was not one single person charged with a violation of Cleveland’s assault weapons ban. That’s right, not even one.

In 2007 (before HB347 took effect), there was one person prosecuted for a violation of Cleveland’s bans. The case never made it to trial because the Grand Jury returned a “no bill”, meaning they didn’t even find enough evidence of a crime for the case to move forward to a trial.

In the mayor’s entire tenure, not only had the City of Cleveland not convicted a single person under their so-called assault weapons ban; they never even took one case to trial!

Even going back to 2005, we found only two people charged with violating Cleveland’s ban. They either pled, or were found guilty. Obviously, the (not so) big drop in convictions for this now-defunct law had nothing to do with Cleveland’s crime problem. That's because the City of Cleveland has rarely used its gun control laws against criminals before, and they won't now. (In fact, our investigation revealed far more about an administration that is soft on gun crime than about inanimate objects causing their woes. Not only did the city fail to enforce their ordinances, but they let bad guys go.)

When a mayor and city council refuse to do things that are proven to reduce crime, and instead commit their city to spending time, money, and resources on things that can't possibly reduce crime and/or are illegal, it is gross negligence.

It's no surprise that crime continues to plague these cities. What else would anyone expect when the city "leaders" are part of the problem instead of part of the solution?

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is co-founder of BFA-PAC, and served as its Vice Chairman for 15 years. He is the editor of BuckeyeFirearms.org, which received the Outdoor Writers of Ohio 2013 Supporting Member Award for Best Website.