Advocates worried by Biden’s actions
Gun owners, advocates increasingly frustrated by president’s decisions
Tyler Hendricks has talked a lot of angry customers off the ledge in the last few days.
The manager of Metal Gear Armory, a gun shop in Lancaster, says folks are responding to President Joe Biden’s proposed gun control in one of two ways.
“We have a lot of people who talk very big – some claim they will be up in arms, literally. They feel like it would be a tyrannical step, too big of an infringement, so they would want to fight back I guess,” he explained. “And other customers are like, ‘I guess I’ll have to comply because that’s the world we live in.’”
Last week, on the heels of two mass shootings within a week of one another in Atlanta and Colorado, Biden announced that he would pursue executive action on two specific gun control measures.
The president seeks to curb the sale of firearms assembled from DIY kits called “ghost guns” and require stabilizing braces – an accessory designed to improve a shooter’s accuracy that transforms a pistol into a gun something more akin to a rifle – be subject to stricter regulation under the National Firearms Act.
Gun owners and advocates in central Ohio are increasingly frustrated, but not surprised by Biden’s decision to pursue gun control measures that they say punish law-abiding citizens, while Statehouse legislators are split on how effective those measures will actually be.
‘Restricting our rights’
From the Metal Gear Armory gun shop in Lancaster to the Columbusbased L.E.P.D. Firearms, Range and Training Facility, gun owners across the state argue that Biden’s executive actions will have little to no impact on gun violence, and have the potential to turn millions of legal gun owners into felons overnight.
“We all want crime to stop and to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys,” L.E.P.D. co-owner Eric Delbert said.
But Delbert is skeptical of how much ghost gun kits are contributing to violence. Biden directed the Justice Department to stop the proliferation of these kits, which can be purchased without background checks and allow a weapon to be assembled without a serial number, rendering the guns untraceable.
Delbert also works in law enforcement in central Ohio but did not identify where as he did not want to speak on behalf of his department. He said ghost guns have not been a major issue in the Columbus area, as far as he knows.
L.E.P.D. does not sell the 80% receiver kits (named for the percentage of material already assembled), but Delbert added that any individual has had the right to manufacture their own gun since 1934.
“What we would like to ask: Is that truly something that’s turning up in crimes?” he said. “But I suspect that’s not the case. I think it’s a shock value – people will say folks are buying guns without serial numbers.”
The Buckeye Firearms Association’s lobbyist, Rob Sexton, said that most gun owners do not purchase ghost gun kits, and the rare minority who do build firearms from scratch pursue the practice as a hobby.
“They’re recreational shooters, and it’s a very expensive hobby and pastime for people,” he said. “You just can’t show me evidence that has some connection with crime wave over the last year when it comes to homicides.”
He predicted that their restriction won’t make Americans safer.
“It’s just stripping the rights of the law-abiding citizen,” Sexton said.
Both Sexton and Delbert are also worried that a potential ban on stabilizing braces would turn 15 to 20 million legal owners of the device into criminals. The executive order targets these braces, which are added onto AR-15 style pistols similar to the one used by the man who shot and killed 15 people in a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store last month.
“In contradiction to what the president said (last week), it doesn’t make a gun more deadly,” Delbert said. “It doesn’t change the characteristic of the gun.”
He argued that placing the braces under the National Firearms Act would backlog an already beleaguered system, which would require gun owners to spend $200 to register, undergo additional background checks and be fingerprinted.
“Invariably these will be put in place and nothing will be done,” Delbert said. “We’ll still wake up with three shootings every morning – that’s just the frustration.”
Will it make a difference?
Ohio lawmakers across the aisle are stuck in opposing camps when it comes to addressing gun violence.
State Sen. Cecil Thomas still wears a red “Do Something” button pinned to his suit jacket before he walks into committee.
It’s a reminder of the promise that Gov. Mike Dewine made following the
August 2019 mass shooting in Dayton’s Oregon District, where a crowd gathered for a candle-lit vigil chanted at the governor, demanding he take action.
Dewine drafted a serious response but backed down from mandatory universal background checks and his initial red flag proposal, which would have enabled
a court to issue a “safety protection order” and direct police to seize a person’s guns if they were deemed a threat.
Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t voted on a single gun control measure since the shooting.
Other representatives, including
Thomas, a Cincinnati Democrat and former police officer, are all for Biden’s executive actions.
“For every ghost gun that does not get out there that can be used to cause carnage, that’s one less gun and several lives that are saved,” he said. “We’re always saying that the person who’s gonna do what he’s gonna do will get his hands on a gun, but we want to make it as difficult as possible.”
Thomas scoffs at the line of argument that armed bad actors need to be stopped by a good guy with a gun.
“The first line of defense against anarchy is your law enforcement community – that’s why we have police to respond,” he said. “A good guy with a gun has never been a deterrent.”
His colleague, Sen. Matt Dolan, a Republican from Chagrin Falls in northeast Ohio, who championed Dewine’s gun proposal following the Dayton shooting, explained that gun ownership isn’t the problem – it’s the kind of individual who owns a gun.
“Our inaction leads to overreaction,” he said, “and what I’m trying to recognize is we do not want people who suffer from mental illness or who are emotionally unstable to have a gun or have a weapon.”
Dolan does not support the president’s gun control measures nor does he think they will be effective, but stressed that Republicans need to propose some kind of legislation.
“We can’t just say, ‘Don’t take away my guns,’” he said. “That’s not gonna be enough because if nothing happens that’s going to lead to them taking our guns and infringing on Second Amendment rights.”
For Ohio gun owners like Tyler Hendricks, who manages Metal Gear Armory, compromise seems out of reach. Bad guys with guns are going to do bad things, regardless of how many rules there are, he reasoned.
But he wants the public to be levelheaded and well-informed.
“Executive action is going to have a lot of people up in arms,” Hendricks said. “I would like cooler heads to prevail, and I don’t think you can be in a conversation unless you understand both sides.” cdoyle@dispatch.com @cadoyle_18