OSHP bureaucrats were wrong last time. Why listen to them now?
The Chillicothe Gazette is reporting on problems concerning the “plain sight” provision in Ohio’s concealed-carry law, which governs CHL-holders while traveling in motor vehicles.
From the story:
- When a licensee steps into a motor vehicle or onto a motorcycle, the gun on his or her hip has to go one of three places: holstered in plain sight on the person, into a locked glove box or a locked case in plain sight.
That's just asking for accidents, said Gerard Valentino, central Ohio coordinator for the group Ohioans for Concealed Carry. The safest place for a gun is holstered on someone's body, and when you ask them to move it around when he or she gets into a car, the chance for something to go wrong increases.
The law's sponsor, State Rep. Jim Aslanides, R-Coshocton, also said there are problems with that provision, which he said is discriminatory. Women generally don't wear belts, he said, making it difficult to keep it on their person, and keeping it in a purse is illegal unless the purse locks.
The original authors of this provision, which has no precedent in a single other state’s concealed carry law, were Ohio State Highway Patrol bureaucrats. So is it any surprise the OSHP plans to oppose removal of this useless provision?:
- Lt. Rick Zwayer, a spokesman for the State Highway Patrol, said the law is fine how it is.
"We haven't seen a negative effect one way or another, and I think that's obviously a good thing," he said.
Maybe they’re just not looking very hard:
Like the gun ban lobby, which claimed that blood would run in the streets if Ohio adopted a CCW law, the OSHP has lost all credibility in the midst of the success of OhioCCW.
During the debate over OhioCCW, the OSHP repeatedly claimed that arming licensed, trained citizens presented an officer-safety issue. Those claims were already provably false by looking at other states’ experience, and they are now probably false with a simple examination of Ohio’s experience in its first year.
They were wrong, and that fact needs to be kept squarely in mind when considering any future OSHP claims that the sky is falling over a proposal to reform Ohio’s concealed carry law.
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