Another OFCC Section 9 victory – Lorain gun ban proposal killed in committee

Ohioans For Concealed Carry membership coordinator Dan White attended the Lorain City Council committee meeting Monday, and has reported that a proposed ordinance to ban firearms on all city-owned property is effectively dead.

After a reading of the proposed amendment, the microphone was turned over to Lorain law director Mark Provenza.

Mr. Provenza read the relevant sections of the ORC, including Section 9, that stated that municipalities can't ban. He reminded everyone that city owned buildings are already banned. He told the council that his original go ahead for them to consider the legislation was based on comments from the AG's office spokesperson in the Elyria Chronicle Telegram that the AG was deferring to the cities to decide on whether or not to enact bans.

Provenza informed council members that every indication since then has been that cities are NOT free to ban, and quoted information provided by the Ohio Attorney General’s office to Sen. Randy Gardner (and originally reported by OFCC) which stated that "local ordinances cannot override state law", and acknowledged that cities cannot ban on public transportation services such as busses.

The law director went on to say that as far as he could tell, what the AG spokesperson meant when quoted in the Elyria paper was that the cities are free to do as they choose, but that they are on their own if they do. His final recommendation to the council was that it “wait and see” what happens in Elyria. He said it was his opinion that the Elyria ban will be challenged and that they will lose. He advised Lorain City Council to let them waste money in a losing battle.

Regular readers of this website will recall that the City of Findlay recently backed down from plans to enforce a ban, stating that they’d rather allow Toledo to become a test case.

Provenza finished by calling the proposed ordinance "unenforceable and unconstitutional" and stated it is his "opinion that council should not consider this ordinance."

Councilman Lazano motioned that the issue be tabled indefinitely. The motion was seconded and passed. It was noted that the issue would not be considered again unless recommended by the law director.

Afterwards, the large audience which had come to speak in opposition to the proposal applauded.

What follows is an excellent article on how some other government entities are trying to circumvent Section 9 at the encouragement of the County Commissioners Association of Ohio, and how no matter what they try, they can’t get around the law.

"Parsing a Firearms Farce"

by Garry Reed
Published 01 May 2004

While mousing through one of my virtual history folders the other day I knocked the pixel dust off of an old article from Ohio headlined, "Belmont County Wants No Guns On Its Properties." Why did I save this snippet? I wondered. A quick review served as a memory prompter: while Ohioans had recently won back the right to concealed carry from their state nannycrats, they were simultaneously losing any place to do the actual carrying. A feature, I foresaw, that lent itself to a little libertarian parsing.

(Parsing used to be strictly the province of English majors, in which a grammarian could peruse a selected text and declare, "This is a verb, this is a noun, and this is a subjunctive intransitive modal augmented with an adverbial phrase and lexically bifurcated by a dangling metaphor in the tertiary syntax." Today, parsing is a popular political pastime in which a
perfectly objective journalistic pundit, or some other practitioner of spin, can review a speech and declare, "This is a bucket of bull, this is proof of a vast right wing conspiracy, and this all depends on what the meaning of is is.")

The article in question appeared in The Intelligencer & Wheeling
News-Register. (The last time I checked my US atlas, Wheeling was situated in West Virginia, not Ohio. It is an old atlas, however, and therefore may not account for any effects of continental drift that may have occurred recently.)

Okay, that was fun but mostly irrelevant padding. Here's the story, accompanied by that little libertarian parsing I promised:

The second the Ohio Gov signs the concealed carry law (which should now read "signed" as I'm admittedly quoting an old article from March 31) Belmont County commissioners were ready to start slapping/have already slapped "no guns allowed" signs on every speck of county property. So how, you ask/asked, can local yokelcrats thumb their snouts at a statewide law?

According to The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register (of West Virginia, not Ohio), the law supposedly says they can. Quoting Belmont County Commissioner Mark Thomas thusly: "As much as the new legislation allows a person to carry concealed weapons, it also gives employers the authority to ban weapons from their establishment." And furthermore, further quoting said article: "county officials have concern not just for the safety of
elected officials, but also for their employees."

And that's where the parsing problem appears.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: pars verb 2 : to examine in a minute way: analyze critically

Except in this case we need to parse Belmont County Commissionercrats' opinions: exactly how does the noun phrase "public servant" get parsed into the professional appellative "employer?" County commissioners are not "employers," the civil subservients who work for them are not their "employees," and the buildings they work in are not "their establishment."

Commissioners and civil servantcrats are all employees of the citizens of Belmont County, and the buildings they work in are owned by those same Belmontians.

No libertarian, even the inveterate gun nut type, would preclude an employer, or any private person, from banning guns from their personal property. Or banning porn or water balloons or chewing gum or little yapping Pekinese dogs for that matter. But elected officialcrats are neither employers nor owners of public property and therefore have no right to turn county assets into non-defense zones.

But that's exactly what they're doing. Thomas wants to ban guns from his "place of business." The fair board wants the ban extended to the county fairgrounds, which is apparently their "workplace." What next, the county library, Parks and Recreation, sewer and waterworks, the dog pound, the cemetery?

Pretending to be employers in order to prohibit concealed carry in public places completely contradicts the codification of concealed carry in public places. Black is white, up is down, verbs are nouns and pigs take wing in Belmont County. Or do county decrees cancel state statutes in Ohio? Plus, Countycrats never explain why they think county employees need protection
from protecting themselves. Are their lives less important than private people's lives?

Unfortunately, it's not just Belmont County. This gun phobia policy was developed by "the staff and board of trustees of the County Commissioners Association of Ohio." Seems every county in the state will be trying to parse themselves into "employers."

Let's hope there are enough freedom-friendly Buckeyes up north to buck/will buck/are bucking/have successfully bucked this nutty notion of who's the employer and who's the servant.

Parse that, Firearm phobics!

Originally from http://www.freecannon.com/ParcingFirearmsFarce.htm