Sentencing of Mayor Frank Jackson's nephew exposes impotence of Cleveland gun control laws

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting that the nephew of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has been convicted on a federal weapons charge and sentenced to eight years in prison.

What Plain Dealer journalist Eric Heisig didn't bother to note is that Major Jackson is a long-time gun control extremist. The article also failed to mention that Jackson's nephew is not being charged with violating any of his grandfather's impotent local gun control laws.

From the article:

Nicholas Martin, 38, has a history of arrests and convictions for crimes involving drugs and violence.

He was arrested the morning of March 2, 2017 when an off-duty Cleveland police officer found him in his car asleep at at a traffic light at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Corlett Avenue. The officer saw a pistol on Martin's passenger seat, according to court filings.

Officers also found a pill bottle, and Martin told officers that he had drank a bottle of Hennessy and taken two Percocet pills, according to court records.

He pleaded guilty in October to a felon in possession charge.

According to the article, Jackson joined his brother, the criminal's father, at the sentence hearing, and had also submitted a letter to the judge in support of his nephew.

"As Nicky's uncle, I spent a lot of time with him from infancy through his teens," Jackson wrote. "As a family member, of course, I see him from those innocent times and see his best qualities. So I am writing from that perspective.

"I am not going to go into details about anything in particular, I just know he is my family, not who his record would indicate and I love him."

Last summer, Jackson offered excuses for another family member, his grandson and namesake Frank Q. Jackson, when the 20-year-old was indicted for carrying a concealed weapon without a license, and improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle, both fourth-degree felonies.

In a statement released following the indictment, Mayor Jackson said "Frank is my grandson and as any parent or grandparent who has raised children in a challenging environment knows, there is a constant worry about their wellbeing."

Mayor Jackson's repeated efforts to violate the Second Amendment rights of residents of this "challenging environment" have been found by courts to be unconstitutional (see here and here).

Just last week, the Ohio Supreme Court refused to take up the City of Cleveland's appeal of an Eighth District Court of Appeals decision which declared that a Cleveland gun offender registry and several gun regulations first proposed by Mayor Frank Jackson in 2014, and passed by city council in 2015 are unconstitutional. A lower court had already struck down other parts of the law in 2016.

Buckeye Firearms Association has fought Jackson's efforts for many years. We have repeatedly exposed the fact that the local gun control policies he supports are rarely used to prosecute crimes because, as municipal statutes, they can only be enforced as misdemeanors, whereas when crimes are committed involving firearms, state laws have been violated that carry felony penalties are involved. Given the choice, prosecutors will naturally chose to pursue charges on the higher penalty.

It's no surprise that crime is up in a "challenging environment" like Cleveland. 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.