OFCC Response To The Columbus Dispatch Editorial

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Published on Monday, 22 September 2008 21:49

Written by Jeff Garvas

The following was submitted to the Columbus Dispatch this past weekend in response to this editorial from Saturday:

The Dispatch response to the Ohio Supreme Court decision in Ohioans For Concealed Carry v. City of Clyde is as laughable as the city's Hail Mary argument.

If the legislature didn't recognize the established principle that private property owners can prohibit nearly anyone from their property editorials and courts across the state would have been up in arms.  Four years later this paper is buying into the silly argument presented by cities that they should get to ban guns in city parks because privately owned parks could if they wished.

The City of Clyde and others made this absurd argument because it was the only card up their sleeve to define Ohio's statewide, license based, concealed carry law as 'not a general law', the only way to invoke home rule authority over an area of law otherwise presumed to be of a statewide concern.

Ohio's concealed carry law does apply "to all parts of the state alike" because private property is treated uniformly statewide, and city owned property is treated uniformly statewide.  The fact that two "parks" might be treated differently due to their ownership is completely irrelevant. Nothing in the concealed carry law deals with parks, and private property rights prevail once again.

The Dispatch would do its readers a service if they pointed out the fact that local governments enact ordinances, which have a maximum penalty of a misdemeanor.  Local ordinances in Ohio were a patchwork quilt of anti-gun activist success stories from complete bans to registration schemes, aimed to complicate transportation and ownership of firearms, and had no impact on real "gun crime" activity.

Your readers would be better served if you told them that this past spring 52-year-old Chevonne Ecclestone was struck in the head by a 15-pound rock, brutally beaten, and left for dead while walking her dog in a Parma, Ohio Metropark. Her purse, wallet, cell phone and vehicle were stolen. She was found unconscious with a cracked skull by others in the park and died two weeks later. Her attacker had thirty-six arrests and was out of prison for just ten days. Police increased their "presence" after the attack in a jurisdiction comprising more than 21,000 acres of land and 100 miles of connecting parkways.

Just four days earlier Shawn Stevens of Elyria was shot in the back, beaten with a tree limb, and molested at Lorain County Metro Parks' Carlisle Reservation. She survived the horrific attack, but she'll remain paralyzed for life.

Moments after a 21-year-old mother of two, aged two and six months old, placed the younger girl in her stroller in Sharonville's Gower playground she was grabbed by the shoulder. The 16-year-old rapist forced her to perform oral sex on him in view of her own children, near kids playing soccer, and in broad daylight. He later confessed to the horrific rape in court.

Tell your readers about the rapes, assaults, and beatings that take place in parks across the state and then they might temporarily set aside that emotional "kids on a swing" mental image and understand why this organization took a ban on guns in parks, carried for self-defense, all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Sincerely,

Jeff Garvas, President
Ohioans For Concealed Carry
http://OhioCCW.org

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