Gun-control progress, tardy and tentative, nonetheless welcome
It should not have required back-toback mass shootings leaving 36 people dead and dozens more badly hurt over the course of a weekend.
But if the horror of El Paso and Dayton at long last opens the door to some reasonable gun control in Ohio, that progress will be welcome nonetheless. Several developments in recent days leave us hopeful.
First was the spontaneous expression of popular will by people in Dayton listening to Gov. Mike Dewine’s address following the Aug. 4 shootings. The shouts of “Do something!” interrupted his speech and apparently were effective; two days later, when he proposed a red-flag law and near-universal background checks, he said the people who had shouted “were absolutely right. We should do something.”
On Thursday, Republican state Sen. Peggy Lehner of the Dayton suburb of Kettering announced that she intends to sign on as a sponsor of Senate
Bill 19, a red-flag measure introduced in February by Democrat Sandra Williams of Cleveland.
Could the gun lobby’s iron grip on gun law in Ohio be slipping?
Next came a Friday interview with Senate President Larry Obhof in which the Medina Republican, who enjoys a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association, said a hypothetical red-flag bill is “not dead on arrival.”
The Ohio Republicans willing to consider a redflag law are right to insist that such a bill must include due process for anyone whose weapons could be temporarily confiscated.
Dewine’s proposal lacks some important measures. Most notably, it wouldn’t limit the capacity of magazines such as the double-barrel, 100-shot device that allowed the Dayton shooter to fire at least 41 bullets in less than
30 seconds. And encouraging words from Lehner, Obhof and others don’t necessarily mean that large numbers of Statehouse Republicans are prepared to join the Democrats who have been pushing for greater gun safety for Ohioans for years.
And most still support House Bill 178, an extremist measure that would let Ohioans carry concealed weapons without any permit or training. That’s an idea that virtually begs for more firearm tragedy.
Still, the movement by some Republicans represents progress and stands in sharp contrast to the unreasoned bile of a Facebook video by Chris Dorr, leader of a group called Ohio Gun Owners. Dorr’s 80 long minutes of tough-guy posturing for donors includes inflammatory language that has alarmed some. Describing how the group will work to defeat any lawmaker who doesn’t vote his way, Dorr declares, “…there will be political bodies laying all over the ground… we gun owners will pull the trigger, and leave the corpse for the buzzards.”
Dorr declared Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley “a horrible human being” and said state Rep. Candice Keller, a Middletown Republican who posted a truly vile statement blaming the El Paso shootings on a host of liberal-friendly groups, is “a wonderful woman.”
It's nasty and juvenile, but the real menace is in Dorr’s appeal to unthinking zealots — his glorification of the blind hostility that makes civil society impossible.
Referring to a Dewine press conference in which members of a rival gun group participated, Dorr said, “These are the enemies of the Second Amendment… the people who are trying to destroy this country.”
He’s wrong about that. He’ll find the greatest source of destruction in the mirror.