Posted on 05/30/2008 5:24:29 AM PDT by marktwain
Ted Strickland’s first gun was a Roy Rogers cap pistol, “like the ones the cowboys use,” he said this week.
After that, the governor remembers shooting squirrels and rabbits with a .22-caliber rifle.
From that foundation, Strickland has supported gun rights in a way a lot of other Democrats haven’t—before it was trendy.
It’s been a tough couple of years for Toby Hoover. More than three decades ago, her first husband was murdered during a hardware store robbery, and since then, she’s fought to spread the message that putting more guns into more hands would make Ohio a violent and scary place to live.
You might think that Hoover, as a victim, would be someone a politician could safely rally behind. But as NRA-backed legislation that would loosen Ohio’s gun laws moved through the Statehouse this week, Hoover’s phone has stayed pretty quiet.
“They’re not asking my opinion—they’d rather skirt the issue during election season,” said Hoover, a Toledo native and director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. Hoover has spent the better part of the last 30 years fighting laws that make it easier for people to carry guns in Ohio—including the state’s concealed-carry law, which was signed in 2004.
Since then, her coalition has unsuccessfully pushed for measures that would require background checks for all who purchase weapons at private gun shows, as well as efforts to child-proof guns, keep them out of juveniles’ hands and allow local governments to pass gun violence prevention laws.
State officeholders would be “well ahead of the game” if they backed such “reasonable steps” to control guns without taking them away from law-abiding owners, Hoover said last week.
“I don’t know why they can’t say they’re willing to do that,” she said.
Part of that reluctance, at least recently, may stem from a Democratic governor. For the first time in recent history, Ohio is run by a guy who gets really good grades from the NRA.
In years past, “Gun owners watched as gun bill after good gun bill either died or was watered down in a GOP-controlled legislature,” wrote Chad Baus, a member of the Fulton County Republican Central Committee and vice chairman of the Buckeye Firearms Association, in a blog posted on the group’s website.
For 16 years, Republican lawmakers found it necessary to go slow on gun laws in order to appease their party’s governor, whether it be Bob Taft, a Cincinnati native, or George Voinovich, former mayor of Cleveland, Baus said.
But unlike his big-city predecessors, Strickland hails from Duck Run in rural Southern Ohio, where toting a gun is a natural extension of a hardscrabble upbringing.
Strickland may have had his finger on the pulse of the common man back in 1994. During his first term in Congress, Strickland voted against President Clinton’s Brady Bill and assault weapons ban while most of his Democratic colleagues in the Congress supported it. That November, Republicans swept out the congressional Democrats—including Strickland himself, who won his seat back two years later.
Although Hoover and other anti-gun activists say that only a small fraction of voters pick a candidate based on their Second Amendment views, Strickland blames his party’s stance on gun control for the loss.
“From my perspective, there is a growing recognition of the validity and the importance of Second Amendment rights than existed 10 years ago,” Strickland said. Party leadership has recognized that pushing the gun control agenda resulted in the ’94 loss of Congress—and not regaining it until a dozen years later.
As a result, Strickland said, “Nationally there is a greater tolerance for rights of gun owners within the party.”
Such tolerance has not yet been extended by Columbus Mayor Mike Coleman. Coleman opposes current efforts by the state legislature to relax gun laws, including a 19-point amendment to Senate Bill 184, known as the Castle Doctrine, which strengthens a person’s legal right to use deadly force if someone breaks into their house or car.
The amendments would allow anyone to carry a gun in their vehicle, whether they had a conceal-carry permit or not. It also would prevent landlords from banning guns in their apartments, and prevent law enforcement officers from seizing legally owned firearms during natural disasters or other emergencies.
Coleman has long believed that looser gun restrictions are a detriment to urban areas and that cities should be allowed to exercise local control over firearm regulations.
“The flow of guns into streets leads to violence,” said Mike Brown, the mayor’s spokesman.
Urban and rural areas have different views of gun control, he said. “The mayor has said many times that there are no deer at Broad and High.”
In 2005, Columbus City Council passed a citywide assault weapons ban that made it a first degree misdemeanor to buy or sell semiautomatic rifles in the city. The move was praised by the FOP, but the NRA opposed the measure, eventually yanking the 2007 NRA convention from Columbus and moving it to St. Louis.
Last year, sweeping firearms reform at the state level trumped Columbus’ citywide assault weapons ban. Despite cries from Columbus officials, the city law was eventually removed from the books.
Strickland said he’s not blind to urban violence. He just doesn’t think that firearms restrictions will solve the problem.
“I understand the trauma experienced in so many communities as a result of the violence associated with firearm use,” Strickland said. But there’s no reason to believe that the kind of person who kills another human being with a gun would adhere to gun laws.
“They’ll always have access,” he said.
As if the governor’s support wasn’t enough good news for gun activists, another Democrat is helping make gun control even more unpopular.
Prior to the Pennsylvania presidential primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton touted her own affection for pulling the trigger, drawing a contrast with Sen. Barack Obama’s comment that small-town, rural voters “cling to guns and religion.” Clinton said Obama’s remarks were elitist and out-of-touch, while also describing a fond memory from her youth:
“You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl,” she said last month during a speech in Indiana.
Ohio firearms supporters have recently shared Clinton’s characterization of the anti-gun crowd. The Buckeye Firearms website takes aim at “the elitist union leaders at the Fraternal Order of Police.”
“It’s very elitist to tell people what rights you think we should have,” said Jim Irvine, the group’s director.
Most politicians and urban dwellers have never handled a gun and therefore have an unnecessary fear of firearms.
“Mayor Coleman doesn’t know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of,” Irvine said. But firearms could go a long way to protect law-abiding residents from crime.
“Criminals are lazy. They go after the easy targets,” he said. There may not be a deer at Broad and High, but there could just as easily be “a 300-pound 6-foot-tall animal of a person waiting to attack.”
The Fraternal Order of Police takes issue with the “elitist” characterization.
“Our organization and our members take offense to the childish comments from the Buckeye Firearms Association,” said Mark Drum, legislative chairman of the FOP of Ohio, in a press release.
“The Fraternal Order of Police is committed to working with the Ohio General Assembly in a productive manner to genuinely address those sections of current law that need clarified and not make unnecessary changes which substantially increase the risk of law enforcement.”
Strickland, a Clinton supporter, said he does not agree with the “elitist” label slapped on gun-control backers, but he does think their position can be politically problematic.
“There has been a recognition nationally that the party’s stance on gun control was polarizing and it was damaging the ability of the Democratic party to exercise leadership on things like health care, education and the environment,” the governor said.
“The leadership at national level decided they were no longer going to make gun control a major position embraced by the national party,” he said. “But there are individuals who continue to push such an agenda.”
Coleman, Strickland said, “is just trying to do what he thinks is right for his city.”
“I would never choose to criticize any political leader who may have a different position.”
The governor doesn’t have much time to hunt these days, he said, and doesn’t need to keep a gun in the governor’s mansion for personal safety reasons.
“Quite frankly, I’m pretty well protected by the Ohio Highway Patrol.”
Rather than arguments about elitism, Strickland would prefer to direct the conversation toward making communities safer by reducing poverty and unemployment.
“The issue of public safety is very complex and involves a lot of social factors,” he said. “In my judgment prevention of these things would be more effective than just simply passing a law.”
Ohio legislators had a chance to do that this week. The bill passed the House Criminal Justice Committee Tuesday, and was expected to pass the full House Wednesday afternoon. The bill, without amendments, passed unanimously in the Senate earlier this year.
“We’re talking to various stakeholder groups,” Strickland said Tuesday. “My hope is that we will come out with a final bill we can embrace and sign into law.”
I'm sorry this lady's husband was slaughtered like a helpless sheep. Too bad he wasn't armed.
It's good to have a home boy as governor.
Go Bucks!
The Other Paper: when liberal daily rags just aren’t leftist enough.
They’ve been spewing their special brand of Marxism-lite for years now with a special, erm, eye on the buggery crowd.
That's because you're ignorant and irrelevant, beyotch!
“the elitist union leaders at the Fraternal Order of Police.”
“Police” are political animals owing alligiance to big city Marxists.
I’m in favor of disbanding all “police” organizations and absorbing the rank and file into elected county sheriff organizations.
That way people, through the direct ballot, control law enforcement, and the concept of the “peace officer” will return. Money for peace officers will go toward reducing crime, instead of enhancing revenue by nabbing citizens for offending some state edict or carrying out leftist political operations.
The Gun is Civilization
by Marko Kloos of the
Munchkin Wrangler blog
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat—it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation...and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.
Lady, was you husband killed by the presence of too many,
or TOO FEW
guns in the hands of law abiding citizens.
“Has it become elitist to support firearms restrictions?”————————————
The answer is of course: No, it *always* has been elitist to support firearms restrictions.
She is looking at the world through the wrong end of her binoculars. Toby should have put a pistol in her husband's hands, so that he could have defended himself.
It might as well be elitest - it’s always been anti-constitutional!
Huh? Isn't 'gun violence' already illegal?
I have posted some of the information from the link below it:
http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/article2664.html
The Joyce Foundation is known for giving millions and millions of dollars to left-wing causes like gun control over the years. In 2000, Toby Hoover dipped her hand into the honey pot, and she’s been making big withdrawals ever since.
From the Joyce Foundation website’s Gun Grants page:
2000: Under the name Toledo Metropolitan Mission, Hoover got a $33,200 grant.
2001: Under the names Toledo Metropolitan Mission (Toledo Ecumenical Area Ministries), Hoover got a $250,000 grant for two years.
2003: Under the name Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. Hoover got a $150,000 grant for 21 months.
2004: Under the name Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. Hoover got a $200,000 grant for 2 years.
$633,200, and that is just from the Joyce Foundation. Hoover’s IRS records also show she received $79,202 undisclosed non-cash contributions in the past two years alone (these could be contributions from other non-profit entities, or from private individuals - itemization is not required unless the amount is greater than $4400). Nearly three-quarters of one million dollars have flowed into this anti-gun organization in just four years, yet after passage of Ohio's concealed carry reform law, the liberal media tried to make the case that money bought the law.
That is so true.
On a personal note: I was in a meeting with Governor Strickland's wife, Frances, last week. She is his advocate on many social issues in the state. She was open to frank dialogue. One council member ripped into interventionists in state government, trying to wrest local control county and township officials. I am in a wait and see mode on which issues we can work with the Governor. That is more than I can say for the previous two administrations.
The link on http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/article2664.html doesn’t work. So, I dug this one up if anyone is looking for more details about the Joyce Foundation.
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