Ohio Has Gone for No-Rules Gun Policy
Ohio Has Its Own Definition of a Well-Regulated Militia
It would be nice if the Supreme Court didn't force other states into the same.
By Jack Holmes Published: Mar 15, 2022
Look, if the state of Ohio wants to allow anyone to carry a concealed firearm without a permit or training, American law seems to increasingly be on its side. In fact, signs are that the engineered conservative majority on the Supreme Court may erase the authority of other states to govern firearm ownership in a different way. Samuel Alito recently signaled the Constitution-whisperers could throw out a 110-year-old New York gun law on the basis they don't like it. (In oral arguments, Alito took the question at issue in the case—whether the Second Amendment confers a right to carry a firearm outside the home in the interest of self-defense—as a premise for his questioning, which is to say he's already arrived at the conclusion.) But we should probably acknowledge that this is incredibly extreme.
"It's a fantasy to think this is going to make us safer," Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey told the Columbus Dispatch, which reports McGuffey is one of a number of sheriffs and law-enforcement groups who opposed the bill. (The law also drops an existing requirement for gun owners to tell police they're armed when they're stopped, and lying to police about having a concealed weapon on you will become a misdemeanor offense.) The Dispatch cited research indicating trained personnel see their shooting accuracy drop 40 percent in high-pressure situations. "And that's for an expert shooter," McGuffey added. "You are going to have people carrying that have no training." According to WBNS in Columbus, the concealed carry program began in 2004 and required 12 hours of training.
Governor Mike DeWine, who just signed the bill, is considered a moderate Republican.
Kirk Irwin//Getty Images
Currently, to drive a car in any state, you need to pass a driver's test and carry a license. Most people outside Libertarian Party debates consider this reasonable: cars can maim or kill people, so you should have to demonstrate some minimum aptitude in wielding one if you want to move around in public with it. And cars have a purpose besides maiming or killing people: they transport you to your destination. Not so for guns. Their only uses are to inflict bodily injury or communicate the threat thereof. And yet in many states across the land, there are far fewer requirements to carry a gun in public. As with every gun-control proposal, opponents consider any sort of guardrails to be an assault on their rights.
Ohio has been trending this way—that is, no restrictions of any kind are acceptable—for some time. Firearm deaths are up 62 percent since 2007, the Ohio Capital Journal reports citing CDC numbers, compared to a 27 percent jump nationally. An astonishing 86 percent of victims over that period were male, no doubt fueled by the huge number of gun suicides. Ohio has no red-flag laws, but it does have a stand-your-ground law. It also allows open carry. Ohio requires no permit to purchase, no registration, no licensing. There are some limits on "dangerous ordnance," but essentially this is the environment that gun-rights organizations advocate for. Local jurisdictions are even banned from enacting more restrictive policies through a state "preemption" law that already once blocked Cincinnati from banning bump stocks. You do need to pass a background check, though it's not exactly an air-tight policy. All this presumably makes for the "well-regulated militia" you sometimes hear about.
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Again, if Ohio wants to operate on the premise that more guns everywhere with almost no rules will make the state a safer place to live, or even that more suicides and homicides are the price to pay for Ohioans to see their rights fully honored, that is their prerogative. But increasingly, it seems that the American judicial system wants to outlaw other states from governing firearms in a more restrictive way than Ohio, in much the same way the Ohio state legislature has outlawed Ohio cities from governing firearms in more restrictive ways. With respect to the current Supreme Court case, this is premised on the idea that 700 years of English and American law upholding the power of local authorities to regulate arms in the public square was all a grave assault on individual rights. Personally, I will not devote any energy to trying to change Ohio's gun laws, but it would be nice if supporters of that regime would not try to force other jurisdictions to enact something similar on the basis that restricting who can carry a gun in public is equivalent to the issues at play in Brown v. Board of Education. States' rights!
Jack Holmes
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Useful Context, a video series.
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