Dewine Signs Two Bills With Pro-Gun Implications

Gov. Mike Dewine pushed for gun control for quite some time after Dayton, but he also signed a lot of pro-gun bills during that time, too. Now, he’s seemingly abandoned his gun control plan and is just signing gun rights measures.

That’s good.

Luckily for folks in Ohio, lawmakers kind of pressed the issue.

Now, two important bills have just become law, and we should talk about them.

 Senate Bill 58

Senate Bill 58 prohibits the requirement of liability insurance or any fees for the possession of a gun or a knife.

It also enacts the Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act by banning governments from keeping a list of privately owned firearms or owners of firearms.

In addition, financial institutions are banned from treating firearms vendors differently than other merchants.

The Buckeye Firearms Association backed the bill.

“It is time to stop trying to punish and infringe the rights of ordinary, law-abiding gun owners for the acts of criminals,” the group said.

According to an Ohio Capital Journal report by Nick Evans, the measure was denounced by an official with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group.

“This is a perfect example of what gun rights extremists in Ohio, led by Gov. DeWine, love doing,” said Alison Shih, senior counsel for the group.

I already like the bill. Shih doesn’t have to keep trying to sell it to me.

Keep in mind that all this measure does is curtail local governments from trying to make it more expensive to lawfully exercise one’s right to keep and bear arms.

In theory, this should fall under the state’s preemption law, but I can see some local government trying to get slick and pretend this isn’t really gun control but revenue creation or something else that we’d all know to be nonsense but provides enough cover they might get away with it in court.

Now, that’s a nonissue. 

Let’s understand that these kinds of measures are all about making it more expensive for law-abiding people to own guns. It creates absolutely no impact on criminals having firearms because, as per usual, they don’t follow the law.

In fact, Everytown can’t even offer a real defense for these kinds of laws, instead simply attacking this one for not being a gun control law in the first place. Shih offers no defense for insurance mandates or anything of the kind.

Funny, that.

The second bill isn’t actually a gun bill in and of itself, but the potential ramifications are going to be felt in firearm policy discussions going forward.

Senate Bill 234 

Senate Bill 234 aims to make sure students know how to reach out if they need help dealing with suicidal thoughts or mental health issues.

It requires schools and colleges to include the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline telephone number, 988, on student identification cards, student planners and electronic portals.

Colleges must also provide information about declarations for mental health treatment as part of the school’s student orientation.

There’s also a bit about allowing the police to carry EpiPens, which I approve of as someone who has had to use one of those before, but the big thing is the suicide prevention effort.

The truth is that anti-gunners love to use “gun death” statistics over violent crime stats because they know suicide numbers account for half to two-thirds of all so-called gun deaths. They want to pad the numbers as much as possible so people will be more and more afraid.

By trying to make sure people in crisis know there’s help available, it will hopefully reduce the number of people taking their own lives. This will reduce the number of “gun deaths” and make it harder for anti-gunners to push gun control with the scariest numbers they can finagle.

That’s good news for our side, sure, but it’s also good news for all the people who may think there aren’t any other options available except to end it all.

That’s the big win, really.