By Chad D. Baus

Municipal bureaucrats who oppose HB347's firearms law preemption provision, which will ensure that firearms laws are uniform across Ohio, do so under the complaint that such a law would tamper with Ohio's home rule provision.

In spring 2004, Columbus' Mayor stood in a city park the day Ohio's concealed carry law became active and railed against the law because it disallows cities to ban guns in parks. The City of Toledo went ahead and banned guns on its secluded jogging trails in defiance of the law.

Last year, Columbus councilman Mike Mentel saw to it that his city lost an estimated $20 million in convention revenue with passage of his useless "assault weapons" ban, which is, as we predicted, failing to prevent crimes on Columbus' streets.

The Mentel Ban is the exact type of ordinance which HB347 would prevent, which is why the bill provokes such a howl from anti-gun bureaucrats hiding behind a concern for erosion of home rule.

Proof that home rule isn't the real motivation of concern for people like Mike Mentel came in the form of a news story published by 610 WTVN last week...

Click 'Read More' to read the story.

By Dean Rieck

An enduring myth of the anti-gun left is that the shooting sports are not really all that popular. They think the only people who are interested in shooting are criminals and the deranged. They assume the “gun guys” are some tiny group of oddballs out of touch with mainstream America.

Well, guess what? They’re wrong. Shooting is popular. VERY popular. In fact, shooting has always been and remains one of the most popular activities of all time. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has waited for an hour or more to get into a shooting range or who has ever been to a shooting competition where hundreds of men, women, and children show up. But it may come as a real shocker to the anti-gun crowd.

Just how popular is shooting? Let’s look at the 2005 “Superstudy of Sports Participation,” a publication of the Sporting Good Manufacturers Association. This wide-ranging survey asks Americans about their sporting activity and includes both men and women from the age of six and up. If you engage in any given activity at least one time per year, you are counted as a participant in that activity.

According to the study, 15,196,000 people went hunting with a gun in 2005. That’s more people than played baseball (9,694,000). That’s right. Hunting is more popular than America’s so-called “favorite pastime.”

Even more people went target shooting, a total of 18,037,000. So target shooting is more popular than playing football (16,436,000). Who would have thunk it? There are more plinkers on the range than players on the field.