The Senate Judiciary on Criminal Justice Committee, chaired by Sen. Tim Grendell (R-18), will hear proponent, opponent and interested party testimony on Rep. Bruce Goodwin's HB450, legislation that would restore gun rights to members of the armed services or the Ohio National Guard who are between the ages of 18 and 21, on Wednesday, December 17 at 10:00 a.m. in the Senate Building's North Hearing Room.

The Chairman has once again indicated that a substitute bill may be offered, and that the bill may receive a vote out of committee.

KEEP CALLING

(and please encourage your friends and family to do the same)

By Richard Munday

The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror around the world have all been utterly dwarfed by the Bombay shootings, in which a handful of gunmen left some five hundred people killed or wounded. Commentators have been swift to insist that we must all "stand firm" against such outrage; but behind the rhetoric, the pundits have been visibly uncertain how an assault like that in India can be prevented or resisted. The Bombay massacre exposed the myth of a number of our security assumptions.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Bombay shootings exposed the myth of ‘gun control’. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny. The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all ‘prohibited weapons’ under Indian law; just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with at best a sheltered awareness of the threat. So far, one has had to be unlucky to be caught like the girls casually machine-gunned outside a Birmingham night club; we have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

By Gerard Valentino

The sporting world is up in arms over the recent accidental self-inflicted shooting of New York Giants star Plaxico Burress.

Popular ESPN commentators Mike Greenburg and Mike Golic began the frenzy of bad gun-related information in their early morning radio talk show. Both repeatedly claimed they could never see a reason to go anywhere if they needed to carry a gun. I’m sure they’ve made their way to a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Luby’s, a local school or university, mall or even a movie theater over the years.

All are places where spree killings have taken place in the past, and I bet many of the victims thought they didn’t need a gun if they were going to such a “safe” place. Many probably also wish they had a gun to fight back as they watched innocent people being brutally murdered, or as the gunman slowly lined them up in the sights.

Mike and Mike weren’t the only sports reporters to get the gun issue so horribly wrong in covering the Buress fiasco. The sports-related commentators making ignorant comments about the gun issue included the so-called best and brightest of the industry.