Top Threats To Our Ohio Gun Rights In 2012

by Gerard Valentino

Every January, Buckeye Firearms Association identifies the top 10 threats to our gun rights for the upcoming twelve months. Historically, the list includes an ever changing line up of anti-gun personalities including the likes of Sarah Brady, Toby Hoover and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. One of the people included on the list more times than any other, however, is the apathetic and uninformed gun owner.

Few individual threats pose more danger to the right to bear arms than the self-proclaimed gun-rights advocate who doesn’t support the latest pro-gun reform, or who refuses to take their business elsewhere when a company discriminates against gun owners.

During 2011, the anti-gun gun owner was front and center during the debate over allowing legal concealed carry in places that serve alcohol. Despite the fact that the reforms proposed in SB17 were already law in every state that surrounds Ohio, the mainstream media didn’t have any trouble getting self-proclaimed die-hard gun owners to claim allowing legal concealed carry in bars was a crazy idea.

In many cases, the offending gun owner opened their anti-gun statement to the media by claiming to be an ardent supporter of gun rights, and often used their membership in the National Rifle Association as proof. Few things sound sweeter to the anti-gun establishment media than hearing someone with ties to the NRA, or another gun rights group, who then claims to oppose the latest pro-gun reform.

Just to be clear, that isn’t an indictment of the NRA, or any other gun group. Instead, it is an indictment of the individual gun owner who is willing to be a mouthpiece for gun-control.

Since 2012 is a presidential election year, the ability of the mainstream media to misrepresent members of the gun community as supporters of President Barack Obama has serious implications. If President Obama returns to the White House, he will be free to pursue anti-gun policies without fear of alienating the electorate, and he is likely to claim a mandate to attack the right to bear arms.

A mandate he will claim demands the appointment of another anti-gun activist judge to the United States Supreme Court.

Such a viewpoint wins President Obama and his campaign staff a spot on the 2012 list.

In the last 10 years, the anti-gun lobby has failed to win a single vote in Congress, or in the Ohio legislature. So, putting the likes of Toby Hoover, or anyone else connected to the Ohio anti-gun lobby on the list is a waste of time. After all, before we can call her a threat to gun-rights, she has to become relevant.

The same holds true for anti-gun Ohio legislators like Bill Patmon (D-10), who is so blinded by a hatred of guns that he is willing to use falsified statistics, misquotes and fabrications as a means to push his misguided agenda. Sadly, it appears only likeminded anti-gun zealots, his legislative staff and mainstream media sycophants fail to see just how impotent Representative Patmon appears to everyone else when espousing one transparently false statistic after another.

His best anti-gun effort remains one of the pro-gun community's best assets. We can only hope nobody lets Representative Patmon in on the joke.

That means for 2012, we are left with only two true threats to our gun rights:

2. President Barack Obama and his campaign staff – Everyone expects him to aggressively pursue an anti-gun agenda if elected to a second term as president. So, it is vital to the pro-gun community that every possible effort is made to see that he fails to win reelection.

1. The Apathetic, Misinformed, or Anti-gun Gun Owner – A united pro-gun community can easily defeat President Barack Obama, just as a unified gun community defeated former Democratic Presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry (D-MA). Sadly, there were just enough gun voters tricked by Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign that he was able to carry Ohio and therefore win the presidency.

A situation that can't be allowed to repeat itself in 2012.

Gerard Valentino, a former military intelligence analyst, is a member of the Buckeye Firearms Foundation Board of Directors and the author of "The Valentino Chronicles – Observations of a Middle Class Conservative," available through the Buckeye Firearms Association store.