Ohio joins Pa. with ‘stand-your-ground’ law, also known as ‘make my day’
Another active shooter was getting busy with his Second Amendment rights as I sat down to write this Tuesday morning, with no final accounting of this latest swoop of metronomic American carnage yet available at deadline.
The ghoulish tally in Frederick, Md., where the active shooter’s day ended typically in his own death, will attach to the spike in gun violence that began last month in Atlanta and Boulder, where 18 bloody corpses served to illustrate a nation eager to get back to slaughtering each other with real bullets rather than waiting out some soulless pathogen.
But there was more gun news Tuesday.
In Ohio, Tuesday was the day the new state law took effect, officially plunging the Buckeye State into the company of 37 others (including the Keystone State) with so-called stand-yourground laws in the statutes.
Funny how this works, and by funny I mean, of course, tragic.
In the weeks after the Aug. 4, 2019, massacre of nine Ohioans in a Dayton nightclub district, then-and-still Gov. Mike DeWine vowed stricter gun laws and scolded the state’s Republicandominated legislature about any proclivity toward scuttling his intentions.
But in January of this year, Mr. DeWine signed the first piece of legislation to hit his desk since Dayton, and all it did was make his state even more dangerous. Ohioans already had expanded self-defense rights inside their homes and cars, where they need not have attempted to retreat from a potentially dangerous situation before using deadly force, but the rules didn’t apply to city streets, grocery store parking lots, county fairs and other public settings.
As of Tuesday, you can fire away in those places too.
“This is a dangerous bill that will put Ohioans’ lives at risk,” Kenny Yuko, the state Senate’s minority leader, told the Columbus Dispatch, “This is not what people meant when they asked us to ‘do something’ after the deadly shooting in Dayton. Today is a sad day.”
As with just about every stand yourground statute, Ohio’s comes with a forest of interpretive phraseology designed to keep the legal system humming with erroneous inferences. Before they shoot somebody based on this particular legal footing, Ohioans must be at their location legally, must not be the party to have started the altercation, must fear for their life or for serious bodily injury, and must be able to explain their reasoning for that.
Don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but many of America’s most infamous shooters, particularly mass shooters, are not in the habit of reviewing fresh legislation. To too many in a citizenry holding 40% of the world’s firearms, “stand your ground” means “make my day.”
“Only cowards would pass and sign a bill that has been proven to disproportionately harm Black people,” House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes told the Dispatch. “Only cowards would support a bill that allows people to shoot first and ask questions later. The blood of lives lost from the signing and passage of this bill will rest solely on those who supported it.”
Of course, not everyone was displeased.
“Crimes can happen quickly and without warning,” went a statement by the National Rifle Association, now financially as well as morally bankrupt. “Most victims have a split second to react with the best course of action for their survival. By signing SB 175, Gov. DeWine ensures the law favors victims and not criminals.”
That’s a mouthful right there, considering that this same sequence of galloping stupidity played out in Pennsylvania beginning 12 years ago this week.
On a quiet morning in Stanton Heights, a young Second Amendment enthusiast graduated to active shooter after arguing with his mother over one of his dogs peeing in the house. She called police. He slipped into his bulletproof vest. In the practical if not the legal sense, he stood his ground and aimed an AK-47 and/ or his shotgun and/or any of three handguns he had available. By noon, Pittsburgh police officers Stephen Mayhle, Paul Sciullo and Eric Kelly were dead out front.
Pennsylvania had no stand-your-ground statute at the time, but within two years, just like in Ohio, the state expanded its socalled Castle Doctrine to include a stand-your-ground law. It is not absolute. There must be a reasonable expectation of imminent danger from a deadly weapon, which must be visible and immediately accessible. You can’t “stand your ground,” by chasing at attacker who is trying to flee, or has fled, nor can you “stand your ground” if you happen to be committing a crime at the time of the perceived danger.
I don’t think the Stanton Heights cop killer, who was convinced Barack Obama was coming for his guns, has spent much time on death row reviewing our current gun laws.
From the moment I became interested in politics in the 1960’s, Republican legislators have raised money and scared a substantial portion of their base with this ridiculous “they’re coming for your guns” tripe.
There are almost 400 million guns in America, which means we have way more guns than people. Whoever “they” are, they’re doing an absolutely terrible job.