BuckeyeBlog

The recent Ohio Supreme Court decision, finding that the City of Clyde’s ordinance prohibiting licensed handgun owners from carrying concealed handguns in Clyde city parks conflicted with an existing general law and was therefore unconstitutional, exemplifies the importance of this year’s Supreme Court elections. The court’s 4-3 decision found that Clyde’s ordinance conflicted with Ohio’s concealed carry law, which was enacted by the General Assembly and signed by then-Governor Bob Taft in 2004. The majority noted that the state law provides that licensed handgun owners “may carry a concealed handgun anywhere in this state,” with specific exceptions. Those exceptions include police stations, school safety zones, courthouses, child day-care centers, aircraft, and a few other places. The law does not provide for an exception for city parks. The 4-3 majority made clear that cities could not now make their own exceptions to Ohio’s concealed carry law. Two of the justices in the majority – Justices Maureen O’Connor and Evelyn Lundberg Stratton – are up for reelection this November. Many gun owners are concerned that Ohio cities will continue to attempt to create exceptions that severely undermine the intent of the state’s concealed carry law. Right now, the Ohio Supreme Court is the backstop against such actions. Without O’Connor and Stratton on the court, that could change.

Whew. That was a close one.

Four justices of the United States Supreme Court are prepared to rule that there is such a thing as a collective right.

Good lord.

So proponents of individual freedom won out, by the thinnest of margins. Good on Justice Kennedy, the unreliable justice.

Good on the strategists who rolled the dice under tough circumstances and won (let’s forget how easily it could have gone the other way, and what a disaster that would have been, for gun rights and all rights).

An amusing footnote on reporter editorializing: These two paragraphs just don’t belong in the story.

The ruling came the day after a worker at a plastics plant in Henderson, Kentucky, used a handgun to shoot and kill five people inside the factory before killing himself, the latest in a series of deadly shooting sprees across the country.

The United States is estimated to have the world’s highest civilian gun ownership rate. Gun deaths average 80 a day in the United States, 34 of them homicides, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

Really, they ought to know better. If they want to argue for liberal concealed carry laws, so that victims such as these could protect themselves from assaults, they should write a column saying so. Sheesh.