OHIO DIVIDED
State’s gun laws have seen major changes in 20 years: What happened?
Guns are tools for hunting, recreation, self-defense, committing acts of violence, and for war. But in the last two decades, certain firearms like the AR-15 style rifle have become something more: A totem. A symbol of political ideology.
And Ohio is the perfect example of how that national narrative shift transformed the laws governing guns.
The Buckeye State flipped from one of the last states to permit concealed carry in 2003 to a state Guns and Ammo magazine ranked as “steadily moving its way forward” in 2022.
Even the 2019 mass shooting in Dayton, where nine people died, didn’t divert Ohio from that path. Gov. Mike Dewine promised a crowd of mourners chanting “do something” that he would do “everything that we can.”
But Ohio’s gun laws went in the other direction after the deadliest mass shooting in recent Ohio history. Instead of becoming more restrictive, lawmakers eliminated the duty to retreat (before using force in self-defense) and lowered training requirements for armed teachers.
For gun-rights supporters, this marked a return to how our founders envisioned America, a restoration of the liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights. For opponents, however, it was a capitulation to gun manufacturers that prioritized profit over children. An emblem of America’s increasing inability to consider the opinions, beliefs and wellbeing of others.
“In a lot of ways, Ohio is the story,” said Ryan Busse, a former Kimber Firearms executive who writes extensively on this issue. “It’s kind of the story of
guns, but I think it’s really the story about the genesis of our national division.”
A rift so inviolate it divided Ohio’s gun rights community, ended careers and sent armed protestors to the lawns of Republican leaders. And it starts with an airline pilot irritated to learn he can’t get a concealed carry permit in Ohio.
Why data doesn’t change policy
Ohio outlawed carrying a concealed weapon in 1859, and the blanket prohibition remained even as surrounding states created permit processes. By the late 1990s, only seven states still had a blanket ban.
“It didn’t occur to me that was the law,” Buckeye Firearms Association co-founder Jim Irvine said. “I had never heard of a blanket ban.”
He’d recently moved back to Ohio, and a friend suggested joining Ohioans for Concealed Carry.
The group had been working for years to convince state lawmakers that CCWS wouldn’t result in more gun deaths. And Irvine became one of their leading lobbyists.
His work as an airline pilot gave him Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, and those were the days lawmakers held committee hearings at the Statehouse.
Irvine muddled his way through his first committee hearing. He felt comfortable speaking, but he needed more institutional knowledge. He needed to learn gun law history, crime statistics and the data used by gun control groups.
“I suspected stuff they said was wrong, but I didn’t know the ins and outs of it,” Irvine said. “I started reading the propaganda on both sides to sort out what the truth was.”
But the truth, at least regarding firearm statistics, depends on who you ask.
Take, for example, the troubling statistic from the 2020 mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That year, guns became the leading cause of death among minors in America — eclipsing vehicle deaths for the first time in at least 40 years.
“This change was driven largely by firearm homicides,” according to a research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Moms Demand Action didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) correlated a spike in firearms sales during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with these higher rates of gun deaths.
AAP concluded that school closings, a lack of adult supervision and more guns in the home were to blame.
“I had a hard time reading that (statistic) on the floor,” Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-lakewood, said.
She shared it in April 2023 as an argument against a bill banning local governments from requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance.
After the bill passed, Antonio thought, “What in the world are we doing? What are we doing? We’re not talking about cancer. We’re not talking about some mystery disease that we don’t know how to stop. We’re talking about something that, if we made the decision to do it, we could stop these deaths tomorrow.”
Folks like Irvine, however, pointed to CDC mortality data showing an 86% increase in minor drug overdoses in 2020, begging the question of whether access to guns or a mental health crisis was to blame.
“I think that isolation and, frankly, what we put people through in 2020 is responsible for a lot of that,” former Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof said. “I’d like to see some connection between legal gun sales and those deaths, or was the increase in violent crime from weapons purchased illegally?”
In short, the two sides looked at the same mortality statistics and reached different conclusions about its cause.
Why culture matters more
Lt. Gov. Jon Husted grew up in a small town called Montpelier. Nestled in the state’s northwest corner, the rural village’s population has stayed at about 4,000 since World War II.
“I was shooting guns from the time I can remember,” Husted said. “I think I got my first BB gun when I was five or six years old. Hunting and shooting guns were part of my life and my culture.”
It was normal for Husted and his buddies to bring their shotguns to high school in the early 1980s. They often went hunting or shooting after class. Sometimes, they even left their firearms inside the building before football practice.
“And no one thought anything about it,” Husted said. “That’s how I grew up. There was no gun violence (in Montpelier).”
Husted’s not the only leader with that history.
Many of Ohio’s recent leaders, including former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, were raised in similar places. Small towns and farming communities that taught hunter safety courses in eighth grade and schools closed for the start of deer season. Places where you’d be hardpressed to walk through a church parking lot without spotting an NRA bumper sticker.
“They’re people who remember how guns played a positive and important role in their lives,” Busse said. “And for whom shooting brings back times you want to remember with people you want to be with.”
That’s a different set of life experiences from someone who grew up in a city like Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Canton, Dayton, or Toledo.
“I know that the idea of holding a gun in their hand is a scary abhorrent thing to some people because their only life experience (with firearms) is a negative one,” Husted said. “But that’s what freedom is about. You have the freedom to exercise your Second Amendment rights or not. You try to legislate around allowing people to be free.”
Husted helped override former Gov. Bob Taft’s veto of a law banning local communities from passing their own gun restrictions when he was speaker of the House. The only time in Taft’s eight years in office that the Gop-controlled legislature overrode him.
Husted then shepherded the Castle Doctrine law signed by Strickland, which eliminated the legal duty to retreat before shooting someone inside your home or vehicle.
“I think it makes some reasonable sense if a person is being threatened in their home or personal vehicle that they have a right to protect themselves,” Strickland said. He even had a National Rifle Association membership at one point.
But the kinds of gun legislation moving through the Statehouse changed, at least in Strickland’s opinion, after the Tea Party wave election in 2010. It was the first national election after President Barack Obama took office, and Ohio Republicans reclaimed the governorship.
The GOP started expanding the number of places Ohioans could carry concealed weapons, but they also began pushing to remove the duty to retreat before shooting in public, reduce the number of training hours for concealed carry licenses and permit teachers to hide guns in their classrooms.
For Democrats like Strickland, these were the wrong kinds of gun laws, but for Republicans like former Rep. Kyle Koehler, they were the next logical steps.
“When we first passed concealed carry in 2004, we were told it was going to be the Wild West. People were going to be pulling their guns and shooting each other,” former Republican Rep. Kyle Koehler said. “Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see that happening.”
Koehler introduced a “stand your ground” law in 2020, eliminating that duty to retreat in public. And President Obhof carried it across the finish line.
“I support Ohioans’ Second Amendment rights, but irrespective of whether it’s guns, knives, or what have you, people have an inherent right to self-defense, and that’s what the Second Amendment is about,” Obhof said.
That’s why Obhof prioritized passing gun legislation during his tenure as Senate President, 2017 through 2020. And he’s certain Ohio’s last three Senate presidents felt the same way. “It’s not just that we would all vote the right way if the issue came up; it’s that we viewed it as an important issue that needed to be worked on.”
It was a right that needed to be protected.
Obhof blocked Gov. Mike Dewine’s package of gun reforms (STRONG Ohio) introduced in response to the Dayton mass shooting. A 17-point plan that included expanded background checks, stronger penalties for gun crimes and expanded latitude for judges to mandate treatment and temporarily confiscate firearms.
“I think there’s a difficult challenge in making sure (red flag) laws are not too expansive and don’t violate the due process rights of people who haven’t yet done anything wrong,” Obhof said.
That kind of law was a nonstarter, so he pushed lawmakers in a different direction.
Ohio increased mandatory minimums for repeat offenses, gave judges greater discretion to order mental health treatment, improved the speed and efficiency of Ohio’s criminal background system, and expanded the scope of protection orders.
“All the things we did that safety advocates ought to be supporting kind of get lost in the shuffle,” Obhof said.
Dewine’s “still in favor of the guts of the STRONG Ohio proposal,” spokesman Dan Tierney said. But he’s currently focused on measures that can become law, like fully funding a statewide suicide hotline to “help people never get to that point.”
But Democrats sats those changes won’t solve the core problem of separating potentially dangerous people from their firearms.
“We had an incredibly long list of sensible gun legislation that we wanted to put through,” Antonio said. Everything from requiring background checks for all gun show sales to safe storage requirements and several different versions of a red flag law that would let judges order the temporary removal of firearms from the possession of someone found to be a danger to themselves or others.
“(STRONG Ohio) was a baby step in the right direction,” Antonio said. “The fact that we did not even get some of the components of that put through is very telling. It showed how strong the gun lobby is in this state and how out of sync the legislature is with the general population.”
Gun culture shifts
Strickland is no longer a member of the NRA. He joined the organization when it focused on hunting and sportsmanship; when it supported some background checks.
“They radicalized,” Strickland said. “They’ve pushed to where people aren’t willing to even allow themselves to have the least bit of inconvenience in order to make it more likely that we can save lives.”
To understand that shift, Busse said, you must understand how American gun culture has evolved over the last 20 years. And that story starts with Colt finally figuring out how to market its Armalite Rifle Model 15 (AR-15) to civilians.
The first AR-15 rifle was manufactured in the late 1950s, but Armalite didn’t have much success selling them. The company sold the design to Colt, and a few years later, the U.S. military chose the M-16 (the rifle’s automatic cousin) as its standard-issued weapon for troops in Vietnam.
“They’re guns for dummies,” Busse said. “And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way.”
The rifles fire small caliber bullets that create little recoil, allowing shooters to be moderately accurate with modest training. They’re the perfect gun for a soldier getting about eight weeks of basic