Ohio Anti-Gunners Living in a Fantasy Land

Ohio has become one of the more pro-gun states in the nation. They’re not at the top, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying, and even a terrible mass shooting didn’t result in massive regulations, which puts them ahead of Florida in my book.

Still, with some significant urban areas in the state, there’s always a risk of things changing.

And at least some in the media want you to think that’s about to happen.

A month of gun violence is prompting new calls for firearm safety regulations. But with a GOP-controlled legislature, some Ohio advocates say they may need to take the laws into their own hands, through a constitutional amendment.

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the Dems haven’t been successful with passing legislation through the General Assembly, they have won at the ballot box.

In 2023, voters overwhelmingly protected access to abortion, legalized marijuana, and kept majority rule for voting.“I think what we have seen on a number of issues, when we have a legislature that is out of touch with where most Ohioans are — and we saw it with the reproductive freedom and I think we see it with this issue of addressing gun violence and common sense reforms — the people eventually do rise up,” House Minority Leader Allison Russo said.

So, basically, they want a constitutional amendment that somehow codifies gun control.

However, let’s be real here, there’s a big difference between just protecting access to abortions or legalizing pot. These are simple measures, and they’re pretty clear-cut.

So far, there’s no specific language being proposed in their gun control effort, which is telling. I mean, it sort of sounds like they want to kill any preemption efforts via a constitutional amendment, but no one is actually saying that. No one is getting into specifics, and that’s a problem.

Especially since it seems unlikely you can codify gun control via a state constitution without running into Second Amendment issues.

And again, those other victories Democrats are claiming in Ohio are issues that many Republicans actually favor to some degree or another. The number of GOP members who support legalizing marijuana is much higher than I’d ever have thought possible. While the party also tends to be pro-life, many individual Republicans differ from their party on that.

What these folks are banking on is that Ohio Republicans will also feel that way about guns, and after the Dayton shooting, if those were plentiful enough to make a difference, I’m pretty sure they’d have already done something in the state.

They didn’t.

In short, the anti-gunners are living in a fantasy. They honestly believe they can turn a pro-gun state like Ohio into an anti-gun mecca with a simple vote, mostly because they tend to believe that everyone agrees with them on some level or another. Then again, when you live in an echo chamber, it’s hard not to delude yourself like that.

Honestly, I’m more than a little sick of these people.

This piece started with a lot of examples of people being shot, but they’ve ignored how so-called gun violence has dropped in Ohio over the last handful of years as the state has embraced gun rights. They act like “anecdotes” is the plural form of “data,” and it’s not.

That’s going to come up in any fight involving a constitutional amendment, and people aren’t going to want to risk a good thing.