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OFCC Sues City of Cleveland Heights, Ohio The sign you see here is posted in Cleveland Heights Parks implying possession of a firearm is a crime. On Friday August 12th, 2011 Ohioans For Concealed Carry Filed a lawsuit against the City the City of Cleveland Heights. The litigation comes after many attempts to resolve concerns over laws that Cleveland Heights not only allowed to remain on their books, but also posted signs at their parks that continue to imply it is illegal to be armed. The City of Cleveland Heights has chosen to ignore our attempts at civil discourse. When individuals have contacted them representing themselves as residents of the City of Cleveland Heights their concerns apparently fell on deaf ears. When representatives of the organization have formally contacted the city's legal representation they've been laughed at and hung up on by the Law Director. It is this arrogance and refusal to work with Ohioans For Concealed Carry that has forced us to seek a remedy through the courts.
Our press release follows. Read the Full Story
Canton PD Event Leads to New OFCC Legislation When officer Harless of the Canton, Ohio police department came upon a vehicle stopped in the roadway most of us were focused on getting restaurant carry legislation signed into law. What took place that evening has become an international viral video, calls for the resignation of the City Council president, and criminal charges against a man who is clearly heard trying to state that he has a license. Ohioans For Concealed Carry has not just raised thousands of dollars in a legal defense fund, but we've written legislation to resolve this matter that Representative Danny Bubp has stated he's going to introduce this fall Read the Full Story

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Rep. Bill Patmon takes us back to Jim Crow days

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Published on Sunday, 13 March 2011 16:56
Written by Philip Mulivor

Ohio Rep. Bill Patmon has proposed an amendment to HB45 that would permit restaurant carry only if "the person is not in an urban area."

According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 90 percent of Ohio's African American citizens live in what Rep. Patmon's amendment calls an urban area. Patmon's breathtaking public proposal — to deny a civil right in an "urban" area while allowing it elsewhere — takes us all the way back to the days of post-civil war gun-control laws that denied firearms to blacks.

Writer Alec Rawls explains: "Gun control laws in the United States originated as a scheme for keeping blacks disarmed. By turning gun rights into privileges, granted at the discretion of local police chiefs and county sheriffs, whites could keep blacks from bearing arms."1 (If you have the slightest doubt about the racist roots of American gun-control laws, see Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, by Steven Halbrook. This work was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Heller decision.)

The fact that Patmon himself is black may have led him to believe that he can promote with impunity a law that denies a civil right in only urban areas. But his color doesn't mitigate the gross injustice of this embarrassing proposal, which would have been more at home among the Jim Crow laws of the 1800s. Those despicable laws, arising from some states' fear of newly freed slaves, proclaimed "no guns for blacks."

When I first read Rep. Patmon's amendment (which, as of March 13, had been proposed but not officially introduced), I had an urge to glance at the calendar hanging over my desk, imagining that we might have been time-warped back to President Grant's administration, the era that Patmon's amendment seems to come from.

But it was still 2011, and Jim Crow laws thankfully have long been abolished.

Or have they? Isn't a law in 2011 that denies rights only in Ohio's "urban areas" a kind of Jim Crow law, too?

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1Alec Rawls, Capitalism Magazine, January 26, 2003

OFCC Announces Opposition to HB45 Amendments

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Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 22:27
Written by Jeff Garvas

Today the Ohio House State Government & Elections committee hearing Ohio House Bill 45 read amendments to the legislation that would severely gut the bill and other existing areas of Ohio's concealed handgun law to pieces.   Ohioans For Concealed Carry has advised the sponsor of HB45, Representative Danny Bubp, as well as the whole committee that we are opposed to all eight amendments.   The title of the amendments were often misleading and hid the true details of each poison pill proposal.

For instance, one amendment offered by Representative Bill Patmon retroactively declares that all 220,000+ concealed handgun licensees and anyone who obtains a license going forward waives their fifth amendment rights and implies consent to a breathalyzer text simply for having a license to carry a handgun, regardless of if you were armed or not at the time.  This is just one of many over reaching amendments that must be defeated.

Ohioans For Concealed Carry delivered this four page detailed objection on the matter to the committee today.

We highly encourage you to pick up a telephone and call each member of the committee starting on Wednesday and tell each of them that you are opposed to all of the amendments that have been proposed, and that you want HB45 to be passed to the floor.

There are twenty-three members of the State Government & Elections committee that you need to call by cilcking on this link and then click on each member's name to find their office phone number.  DO NOT EMAIL ANYONE.  Due to the substantial amount of email that the legislature is receiving in light of Senate Bill 5 the email system is completely unreliable and uneffective.   PLEASE USE A PHONE!

 

An Open Letter to Law Enforcement Regarding Open Carry

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Published on Sunday, 06 March 2011 03:51
Written by Jeff Garvas

A few months ago a complex discussion in the Ohioans For Concealed Carry discussion forums about law enforcement misunderstanding Ohio laws and the act of openly carrying a firearm lead to a discussion of how can we fix it.  A number of people have experienced encounters where they became the target of "man with a gun" calls and were treated as if they were required to conceal their firearm.

The debate of what method of carrying is better will go on for ages.  The fact is, a number of people choose to occasionally or frequently carry in a manner where their handgun may be partially or completely visible.  All of us benefit from better law enforcement understanding of the law surrounding firearm possession in Ohio.

OFCC has recently had the pleasure of working with several members in composing a letter to law enforcement agencies throughout the state dealing with the issue of open carry.  The letter, in a downloadable *.pdf format, is available here.

A team of grass roots activists has taken on the role of project management and distribution of this letter to be performed county by county.   You can join the effort either by contributing postage or taking on the printing, stuffing and postage of a county.  You can get involved by creating an account on the OhioCCWForums.org website and then read this specific post: Reaching Law Enforcement for Education, Phase 2

 

Court of Appeals rules against Cleveland's last argument in statewide pre-emption

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Published on Thursday, 03 March 2011 21:30
Written by David Kessler, Legal Coordinator

The City of Cleveland may have taken its last gasp of air in its doomed effort to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms.

The gun community rejoiced when the Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled that Ohio Revised Code Section 9.68 prohibits local regulation of gun rights. The City of Cleveland had argued that the clear language of 9.68, (Ohio's version of statewide preemption statutes sweeping the nation), was insufficient to remove the City's ability to regulate guns.  In a nutshell, the City claimed the legislature did not mean to take away the City's power to regulate guns, even though the statute clearly states that very intention.  While lower courts sided with Cleveland, The Ohio Supreme Court disagreed, stating that the Ohio General Assembly could hardly have made it more clear that it intended to outlaw local gun restrictions.

Read more: Court of Appeals rules against Cleveland's last argument in statewide pre-emption

60,000 Ohioans applied for — or renewed — a CHL last year

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Published on Wednesday, 02 March 2011 22:02
Written by Jeff Garvas

Contrary to the claims of anti-gun organizations that insist concealed handgun licenses aren't popular among Ohioans, the number of people in 2010 who applied for a new license (47,000) or renewed a license (13,000) is the second highest total ever, eclipsed only by 2009's record of nearly 72,000.

These numbers are significant because they're more than double the numbers of earlier years. The 60,000 Ohioans that applied for or renewed a license last year would fill the Qucken Loans Arena (where the Cleveland Cavaliers play) three separate times.

The numbers come from Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's annual report on concealed handgun license statistics that was released today. The total number of licenses issued in Ohio now stands at approximately 221,000 (not considering revocations, deaths, or expired licenses).

It's only a matter of time before opponents of the law will point out that the 2010 numbers are roughly 9,000 less than last year, or that fewer people renewed in 2010 than in 2009. But these arguments will be based on typical anti-gun obfuscation of the facts. In Ohio, the original license expired after four years. Later, the law was changed to create a five-year license term, clouding attempts to determine how many licenses may have lapsed without renewal.

The media, on the other hand, are already focused on why so many people are applying to carry a gun.

You'd think they'd get it by now.