Cincinnati Official Decries State’s Restoration of 2A Rights

My time in Cincinnati was brief. Like, less than an hour. A friend and I dropped another friend off at his place as we headed to tiny little Ada, Ohio, to kill a 96-hour liberty when I was in the Navy. It was cold. That’s really all I can say about the city and the state, though Ada really was quite lovely, despite the virtual tundra of snow–when you’re from Georgia, it doesn’t take much to be overwhelming when it comes to snow.

Because my time was brief, I won’t pretend to be an authority on the peculiarities of life in Cincinnati. I won’t even pretend having watched WKRP in Cincinnati imparted some wisdom.

But what I do know, however, is that when an anti-gun politician starts pretending gun control is the answer to a city’s problems, there’s an issue. That’s precisely what happened in Cincinnati recently.

It’s all hands on deck right now as we address community safety Downtown and across all of Cincinnati’s 52 neighborhoods.

And while the city of Cincinnati invests heavily in supporting our men and women in blue, policing alone is not enough to overcome the onslaught of guns in our community. And why do we have so many guns? Because extremists at the Statehouse in Columbus have continued to relax gun regulations and pass dangerous gun laws like permitless carry, while washing their hands of the gun violence across every community in Ohio.

Cincinnati spends roughly $1 out of every $3 of our operating budget to support our police department. That funding not only supports our current police force, but also includes efforts to aggressively expand the Cincinnati Police Department through recruiting new members and officers from nearby municipalities. In our Fiscal Year 2026-2028 budget alone, we authorized adding 150 officers to the force.

While this reflects a core component of our violence reduction efforts, we know we cannot police our way out of the current crisis.

Oh, then just what will get you out of this “current crisis,” then?

But here’s the deal: These are big initiatives tackling big problems, and it will take time to see the results. Meanwhile, guns continue to flood our streets, and we at the local level are not legally allowed to pass any kind of gun legislation.

We need our state lawmakers to step up. Strong gun laws work − just look at the data. According to research from Everytown For Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control and against gun violence through policy leadership, Massachusetts has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation, and it averages 3.7 gun deaths per 100,000 residents. Compare that to Ohio, which has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, and averages 15 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, more than four times as many as Massachusetts.

Of course, let’s remember that Everytown is an anti-gun group and, as such, all of their research should be considered through that lens. Further, Massachusetts isn’t Ohio. There are a lot of differences between the two states that go well beyond gun control policies.

It’s better to look at Ohio as a whole for a moment.

Since Ohio started rolling out those “extreme” gun rights measures, such as constitutional carry in 2022, the homicide rate throughout the state has dropped. In fact, this year alone, there’s been a 38 percent drop in murders compared to this time last year. Cincinnati has had a 37 percent drop in the year-to-date murder rate.

Massachusetts, on the other hand, has seen a 100 percent increase in murders.

Whoops.

This comes after Massachusetts beefed up its gun control regulations recently, it should be noted, and while I’m not going to say definitively that those new measures are the reason for the increase, as correlation doesn’t equal causation, causation should equal correlation. If gun control is this miracle, as the author, a city councilwoman for the city, claims, then just why has their year-to-date homicide rate doubled while pro-gun Ohio has seen it go down?

How does that work if gun control is the answer, the salvation for Ohio’s woes?

If she really wants to do something that will reduce the issues long-term, something that she can do without violating any preemption laws, then how about looking at the lead contamination in her city? Cincinnati has pretty high lead levels, after all. I talked earlier this week about the potential connection between lead levels and violent crime, and even if that’s not the cause, should there be a problem with making the city safer for people overall by decontaminating it and removing the lead?

I’d think not.

But then again, she wouldn’t be able to go off about guns anymore if she actually did something useful for a change, so I won’t expect anything else.

Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at Bearing Arms, we will stand up and tell the truth about the radical anti-gunners while delivering the pro-2A reporting our readers deserve.

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