A look at changes to Ohio gun laws in last 20 years
Last year, Ohio’s new law allowing adults to carry concealed firearms without training classes or background checks went into effect — marking a major change to gun policy in the Buckeye state.
Gun rights groups have pushed for a permitless carry law for more than 20 years.
Here’s a look at other major changes to Ohio’s gun laws over the last 20 years:
2004
Ohio enacts its first concealed carry weapons permitting system.
2006
Lawmakers expand the CCW program and preempt local jurisdictions from having their own firearms laws. Lawmakers overrode a veto from Gov. Bob Taft.
2008
Ohio expands the right to use deadly force to defend a home or vehicle. The NRA praises it as the most sweeping gun rights bill adopted in any state in 10 years.
2011
Ohio allows CCW permit holders to carry guns into bars, restaurants, shopping malls, museums and other places.
2012
Ohio allows gun owners to keep firearms in vehicles in parking facilities.
2014
Ohio reduces CCW required training hours to eight from 12 and expands reciprocity of CCW permits with other states. It eliminates semi-automatic weapons that fire 31 or more cartridges without re-loading from the list of highly regulated dangerous ordnances.
2016
Ohio allows CCW permit holders to carry guns on college campuses, in day care centers, in parts of airports and other places. It bans property owners from barring CCW permit holders from keeping their firearms in their vehicles.
2018
Ohio changes the self-defense law to shift the burden of proof to the prosecution, instead of the accused. It aligned Ohio law with laws in 49 other states.
2019
Following a mass shooting in Dayton on Aug. 4, Gov. Mike Dewine advocates a 17-point plan for gun restrictions and increased mental health services.
2021
Dewine signs a “stand your ground” bill into law, allowing Ohioans to use deadly force in self-defense in public places without first trying to retreat.
2022
Dewine signs a bill to eliminate the need for Ohioans to take an eight hour training course and have a background check to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Laura Bischoff is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
training. But according to the former Kimber executive, the semiautomatic AR-15 didn’t interest American gun owners. “Colt tried many times to sell the guns into the market,” Busse said. “It’s not that they didn’t exist. It’s not that they were illegal. It was that gun culture refused to propagate them into the civilian market.”
In Busse’s opinion, American interest in tactical weapons didn’t take off until the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started in 2001 and 2003.
“Images of soldiers in Afghanistan with M-16s became the best accidental marketing campaign,” he said.
Gun manufacturers started marketing Ar-15-style rifles as the guns carried by heroes. “The marketing campaigns were a way to steal patriotism and wrap an AR-15 around it,” Busse said. “Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep respect and reverence for our soldiers, but the National Rifle Association took it to a whole other level.”
And the marketing campaigns paid off. Sales of what we now call the modern sporting rifle skyrocketed along with companies selling combat-style body armor, specialized scopes and other gear to “make them look more badass.”
Busse called the speed at which American attitudes changed toward the AR-15 “mind-boggling.” The rifles went from being something civilians didn’t love to something you couldn’t criticize without getting fired.
Today, the AR-15 style is now the bestselling rifle in America. Industry estimates put the total number in circulation at 20 million, and a recent Washington Post survey pegged ownership at one in 20 adults or 16 million. Extrapolating that to Ohio’s population would mean 589,000 residents own at least one.
“They’re fun guns to shoot,” Irvine said.
It’s one of the things he thinks gun control advocates fail to understand. People enjoy shooting. Hunters take pride in their accuracy, and collectors memorize makes and models the way sports fans memorize stats.
“There isn’t one kind of gun owner. It’s everybody. It’s high-dollar people, barely getting by people, city people, farm people and everyone in between,” Irvine said. “When foreign media ask, ‘Where do we go to talk to gun people?’ I say, ‘Well, which gun people? They’re all different.’”
Another thing Irvine thinks people misunderstand is that mass shootings with AR-15S represent a small fraction of American gun deaths and injuries. Just 5% of the estimated 400 million guns in the country are semi-automatic rifles. Cheap handguns are the weapon of choice for most violent crimes, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
But their ease of use and “wickedlooking” appearance have made these rifles infamous. They’re now the most common choice of weapon for a mass shooter.
AR-15S are America’s most identifiable and polarizing weapon, Busse said. They’re a totem of freedom. A symbol of gun violence. And firearm manufacturers, in his opinion, are exploiting that political divide to sell even more of them. Ads for sporting rifles have shifted from heroes and home defense to protection against urban warfare and a potentially tyrannical government.
“They’re a way of showing liberals, ‘You can’t tell us what to do.’ There are even ads out there now that say, ‘We build what they want to ban,” Busse said. “It’s the only case where a for-profit industry and this new brand of politics are so intertwined . ... In the simplest of terms, it pisses me off to no end. In more extended vernacular, I worry what it may do to democracy.”
A new breed of gun lobbyist
Chris Dorr wears a black AR-15 pin on the lapel of his suit jacket whenever he visits the Ohio Statehouse.
“It’s the only one I can bring in the building,” the co-founder of Ohio Gun Owners said with a laugh.
Dorr and his brothers, Aaron and Ben, represent a new breed of gun lobbyists. Ohio Gun Owners markets itself as a “no compromise” defender of the Second Amendment against Democrats, Republicans and even other gun rights groups who aren’t doing enough.
“We don’t care if it’s a Daisy Red Rider BB gun or if it’s an AR-15 with a 50-round drum (magazine) hanging underneath it; you don’t have the right to regulate it because it’s our check and balance on you guys ...,” Dorr said. “We own these things as the check and balance on them if they decide to cross that line.”
The group targeted Koehler during the “stand your ground” debate because his bill didn’t do enough, in Dorr’s opinion, to protect gun owners who fire their weapons during these kinds of confrontations.
“His idea is if you aren’t voting for his bill as he wrote it, then you aren’t really pro-gun,” Koehler said. “You’re either throwing to the end zone, or you don’t really want to win the football game.”
When asked why he thinks Dorr adopted this all-or-nothing approach, Koehler laughed, “He does that to make money. If a pro-gun bill comes to the House floor, and it’s well written and a good bill, but it doesn’t go as far as he likes it, he will attack it just to make money. His entire scam is to attack good progun Republicans to make money.”
“The thing that’s changed in the gun community since 2016,” Koehler added, “is who is making money by attacking Republicans.”
In 2017, the Buckeye Firearms Association leaders accused Ohio Gun Owners of “being a false flag group whose only purpose is to convince honest gun owners to give them money.”
Dorr dismissed that allegation during a 2019 interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, saying, “There’s a lot of derrierekissing gun rights organizations in states all across America that would rather play footsie with the establishment political class than actually advocate for gun rights.”
And by early 2020, Irvine was pushed out of his longtime positions as a lobbyist and board president for Buckeye Firearms Association.
“This is big, glorious, fabulous news for gun rights in Ohio,” Dorr wrote on his group’s Facebook page after Irvine’s removal. “Jim Irvine has been the instrument of compromise for gun owners in the Statehouse.”
One year later, Dewine signed the constitutional carry law, eliminating the requirements for training or a concealed weapon permit.
“I would say that the governor signing pro-gun bills is not his natural proclivity,” Dorr said. “But I think that even our governor can see over the years that the ideas he proposed while in Congress were nonsense.”
The timing of the legislation helped too. The bill got to Dewine’s desk weeks before his three-way race in the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary.
“Oh yeah, I mean, we did our absolute level best to get it passed and sent to the governor before the primary,” Dorr said.
The governor’s office didn’t correlate permitless carry or stand your ground with the Dayton shooting.
“Those involve situations that have nothing to do with things like mass shootings or where the person has a mental health issue and somehow got through the system and purchased a firearm,” Tierney said. “That’s part of the reason the governor felt comfortable signing them.”
For Democrats who stood beside the governor after the Dayton shooting, however, those laws shredded their last hope that Dewine would “do something.”
“I’ll be the first to criticize the governor for playing politics with the issue,” Rep. Cecil Thomas, D-cincinnati, said. “He lacked the spine to hold onto his position simply because he wanted to win re-election.”
And he did win. Ohioans re-elected Dewine and Husted in a landslide where Republicans also gained bigger supermajorities in the Statehouse.
“After Sandy Hook, I thought that would have been enough when all those children were killed. And then we had the incident in Uvalde, Texas,” Thomas said. “I don’t know what it’s going to take. Is it going to take someone coming up here to the statehouse and shooting a bunch of us? I don’t know.”
Thomas thought about it for another minute, about whether the gun laws in Ohio will ever swing back in the opposite direction, and sighed.
“I think it’s going to take the ballot box,” he said. “I think voters are going to have to step up and protect the children at the ballot box.”
Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.