Toledo judge ignores Section 9 of House Bill 12

Buckeye Firearms Association has learned that Bruce Beatty, a Luckey, Ohio
resident who has been waging a personal fight against the City of Toledo,
has been convicted in a Toledo Municipal Court for charges filed against him
after he violated a ban on concealed carry in a Toledo city park.

Last
spring, not content to let other court challenges against local gun bans
take their course, Beatty announced that he would stage a protest in a
Toledo City park, and challenged Toledo officials to arrest him. He was
indeed ticketed, and charged with a minor misdemeanor for violating a park
rule.

In a Toledo Municipal Court today, Beatty was found guilty
of violating a park rule which bans carrying a firearm in a park.

Click on the "Read More..." link below for more.

Larry Elder, writing for townhall.com has a good column titled, “How often do Americans use guns for defensive purposes.”

From the article:

Criminologist and researcher Gary Kleck, using his own commissioned phone surveys and number extrapolation, estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes each year. He further found that of those who had used guns defensively, one in six believed someone would have been dead if they had not resorted to their defensive use of firearms. That corresponds to approximately 400,000 of Kleck's estimated 2.5 million defensive gun uses. Kleck points out that if only one-tenth of the people were right about saving a life, the number of people saved annually by guns would still be at least 40,000.

How many times have we heard, “If it saves just one life…”?

Let us put that 40,000 number in perspective.

According to the FBI’s preliminary data for 2004, it’s more than four times the number of murders that were committed in the nations 248 largest cities - combined.

In New York, NY, our nation’s murder capital ranked by sheer numbers, (570 in 2004) and where not coincidently, victims may not have firearms ready to defend their lives, it would take over 70 years to accumulate 40,000 bodies.

By Chad D. Baus

Recently, I wrote a piece examining the importance of pro-gun grassroots activism vs. anti-gun mega-foundation funding, in an investigation that compared media claims that money bought Ohio's concealed carry law to proof that grassroots efforts were what truly made the difference.

In this column, I'd like to offer proof of how volunteer grassroots activism (and persistence) gets the job done.

Since Ohio's concealed carry law went into effect, I and many others have been working to get "no-guns" signs taken back down, especially illegally-posted signs bought with our tax dollars. One such situation was brought to my attention by several people in late 2004.

I was contacted by several people who had noticed "no-guns" signs posted at the entrances to rest stops maintained by the Ohio Department of Transportation. While Ohio law does (ridiculously) prohibit bearing arms for self-defense inside the state-owned rest stop buildings, there is no such prohibition outside. The need for self-defense at these locations was given even greater attention in the wake of two sexual assaults which had occurred at ODOT rest stops. As such, CHL-holders were rightly concerned when they pulled off the highway and were greeted by these signs, and contacted me to see what could be done. At about the same time, another concerned activist contacted me about signs he had seen posted on fences surrounding ODOT highway garages.