Ohio Editorial Boards Continue Their Love Affair With The Gun Lobby Bogeyman

by Ken Hanson, Esq.

It's been three weeks since Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes flexed the hive mind of Ohio's newspaper editorial boards, and now two additional columnists are group think-fantasizing about the Gun Lobby Bogeyman. In another exercise of editorial denial, The Toledo Blade's knee-jerk, anti-gun Marilou Johanek accuses Ohio Governor Ted Strickland of "caving in to the NRA." Once again the usual suspect is the Gun Lobby Bogeyman, equipped with piles of cash and Jedi mind tricks, traveling the country to thwart the beliefs of the common sense majority in order to advance the radical cause of the gun nut minority.

Note to Johanek: Your more scrupulous colleagues have begun to do their own, original research BEFORE writing their articles, and they can objectively report that campaign contributions coming from gun groups are a drop in the bucket. But I know how hard it is to do quality work in the face of losing a cherished loved one unexpectedly, though it is hard for me to determine if you are in stage one (denial) or stage two (anger) of grieving for the mortally wounded Gun Lobby Bogeyman.

Equally public in his mourning for the slow death of the Gun Lobby Bogeyman is The Columbus Dispatch's Joe Hallett. "We are witnessing the death of common sense," wails a grieving Hallett. Because common sense is what Hallett says it is, nothing more, nothing less. The gun lobby is the "Chihuahua with a pit-bull bite." Notably among the credentials that Hallett self-reports is the amount of (research?) time he has spent hanging out in bars, watching people get drunk to the point of fighting. Indeed, with as much barstool sitting and fight watching as Hallett has done, it is amazing he has time to come up with such colorful canine metaphors.

Damn you Gun Lobby Bogeyman! You are the only thing standing between the public and the Gospel of Hallett. From the morose tone of the article, Hallet appears to be all the way to stage four (depression) of grieving over the slow death of the Bogeyman. Or maybe he just wrote it at a bar.

For those keeping track at home, the argument unfolded as follows: Johanek serves up a Governor caving into a hardball gun lobby that is flinging cash at craven legislators who tremble to do the will of the rabid minority, while the police groups and the majority of voters witness the collapse of representative government. For good measure, she admits she has opposed every gun reform in Ohio in the past six years, but only so she can then express her retained anger at being ignored in the marketplace of public opinion.

Hallett offers the Barfly observation that he sure is glad the people he hangs out with don't carry guns while getting plastered to the point of fighting all comers consuming adult beverages, and that the gun lobby is fierce and all-powerful yet simultaneously a paper tiger with a glass jaw. He then concludes that anyone who feels otherwise has no common sense before he moves on to explain why budgetary gaps, addictions and payday lenders are reasons that SB 239 should not pass. (No, I didn’t follow the arguments, either.)

So a quick check of the scoreboard (the one in the real world, not the one hanging in editorial boardrooms) reveals:

1. pro-gun candidates winning elections handily and very frequently.
2. a pittance of campaign contributions from gun groups, especially when compared to those from law enforcement groups.
3. our pro-gun group budgets don't even register compared the budgets of groups like the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence and we have no paid staff.
4. pro-gun bills passing regularly with large bi-partisan majorities.
5. 42 states passing laws that Hallett and Johanek disagree with.
6. campaigns regularly gaining volunteers and support for being pro-gun.
7. no candidate of any note being threatened or defeated for being pro-gun.
8. no candidate of any note being elected upon a platform of rolling back our pro-gun advances.
9. most candidates realizing that newspaper journalists don't show up to knock on doors or do lit drops.
10. civilians absolutely control law enforcement agencies, and while we value their input and opinions, we do not derive our rights from them and we are free to denounce and disregard their input and opinions when it is contrary to public will.

I won't insult the reader's intelligence by examining the conclusions that are supported by the real world scoreboard. Rational, thinking people understand why the tide has shifted and why people like Hallett and Johanek are no longer relevant to the public discourse on gun issues.

So, once again, we see why the media cling so desperately to the Gun Lobby Bogeyman - they need to blame the rejection of their editorial opinions upon a supernatural force that everyone should fear and hate (even though most people have never seen the bogeyman and most of the collateral evidence points to a 100% conclusion that the bogeyman does not exist.)

Only then can the editors explain away their own irrelevance without conceding they are just wrong and the majority of the public knows it.

Ken Hanson is a gun rights attorney in Ohio. He serves as the Legislative Chair for Buckeye Firearms Association, and is the attorney of record for Buckeye Firearms Foundation, which filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court cases. In 2008, the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) awarded him with its Defender of Justice Award. He is the author of The Ohio Guide to Firearm Laws, a certified firearms instructor and holds a Type 01 Federal Firearms License.