by Jeff Thomas

By now everyone has heard about the Chardon High School shooting that left three students dead and two others wounded this week.

Many believed it was just a matter of time before a school shooting reached Ohio. On Monday morning it happened. This just highlights the need to arm willing teachers to serve as the last line of defense of our children.

While a lot remains unknown about Monday's shooting, had a willing and properly trained and armed teacher been present, this could have prevented multiple children from being shot.

I don't know anyone who would argue against the notion that children are the most precious gift in life.

Nor would any able-minded parent stop at anything to protect their children. Having the ability and means to protect children should not stop when they leave the home or enter school where they will spend more than 10,000 hours to someday be able to graduate from high school.

While some may try to argue that targeting schools for massacres is a new phenomenon that began with the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 that left 12 students and a teacher dead, and 21 others wounded, that's far from the truth. Bath Township, Mich., still holds the unwanted title for being the deadliest mass murder at a school in U.S. history when a man, enraged over property taxes to build a new school, set off a series of bombs. Killed were 38 elementary school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber.

There also have been countless other school killings that did not capture national headlines. On top of that, numerous plots have been foiled.

One thing is clear from history: school massacres have happened for many years and will continue to happen. While teachers have received training in how to lock down their classrooms, and police have changed their strategy to have the initial officers on the scene go in as opposed to waiting for a SWAT team, more needs to be done.

It's time we arm teachers who are willing to stand guard between our children and someone willing to harm them. This in no way means arming reluctant teachers, but rather arming teachers who are willing to accept the responsibility.

A teacher willing to take the appropriate training and pass a qualification test could become the one who saves numerous lives.

by Chad D. Baus

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting that a 78 year-old man was forced to shoot a 17 year-old male who to broke into the house he was sleeping in.

From the article:

"Police told me if I hadn't dropped him with that that first one, he would have got me," [Ted] Ziolkowski said in a telephone interview.

The youth remained in Metrohealth Medical Center under police guard. His mother said late Friday afternoon that "he's fighting for his life."

She said her son had been in trouble with the law before. She also said he'd been shot before, when he was 14 and he caught a stray bullet in the leg during a gang shootout in which he was not involved.

This time he was armed, according to police. They did not identify the weapon, but Ziolkowski said investigators told him it was an ancient chrome-plated .32 cal. Smith & Wesson semi-automatic.

by Sean Maloney

It's important that we clean up the vernacular being used by all involved when discussing Fast & Furious. Specifically, "Botched"; the botched investigation; the botched operation; botched attempt to track firearms that were permitted to "walk" into Mexico. There was nothing "botched" about this whole thing. We must stress the true purpose of Fast & Furious. It was a U.S.-run criminal conspiracy pursued for the ultimate purpose of dismantling the Bill of Rights!

The most negligent, unprofessional, obscene words anyone can ever say are: "It will never happen here." - Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

The nationwide media are reporting that five children have been shot at Chardon High School, and that three of the victims have died. Early reports indicate that the shooter used a .22 caliber handgun in the shooting.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, their family and friends, and all the students, teachers, and community in Chardon.

In the wake of this latest school violence tragedy, many will inevitably ask "How can we stop these events from happening?" While there are preventative measures that can and should be undertaken to "harden" the target, asking how we can stop these events is ultimately akin to asking "What can we do so that people are never mad, upset, distraught, or troubled?" The simple answer is that, ultimately, we can't. As such, we had better focus on what we can do. With that goal in mind, a more productive question is "How do we stop these events quickly so that we can limit the damage when they do happen?"

The Cato Institute is offering a special publication by Clayton Cramer and David Burnett, which uses an extensive collection of news reports from over an eight-year period to survey the circumstances and outcomes of defensive gun uses in America.

Federal and state lawmakers often oppose repealing or amending laws governing the ownership or carrying of guns. That opposition is often based on assumptions that the average citizen is incapable of successfully employing a gun in self-defense or that possession of a gun in public will tempt people to violence in contentious situations.

Those assumptions, illustrated in this report, are false. Such cases are an exceedingly small minority of gun uses by otherwise law-abiding citizens and a great number of tragedies - murders, rapes, assaults, robberies - have been thwarted by self-defense gun uses. The vast majority of gun owners are ethical and competent - and thousands of crimes are prevented each year by ordinary citizens with guns.

by Jim Shepherd

It was a government boondoggle from the very beginning. It cost multiples of the budgeted funding, ran years behind in development, caused nothing but problems for law-abiding citizens and, as it has come to an inauspicious end, has failed to save even one life.

Sounds like business-as-usual in Washington, doesn't it?

Fortunately, this boondoggle wasn't "made in America" it was created in Canada.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has had Canada's Long-Gun Registry program in its sights for some time. Now, following votes in both houses of government, it seems the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will be doing some serious deletion work in their gigantic database of Canadian long gun owners.

Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews pretty much wrote the obituary for the registry when he told reporters: "It does nothing to help put an end to gun crimes, nor has it saved one Canadian life. This is simply an attempt to make people feel safe, rather than doing something substantive in criminal law."

Sounds like we need to borrow Minister Towes and send him to New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and a few other "enlightened" cities where eyewash legislation followed by costly litigation and unfavorable rulings have become the rule rather than the exception.

Toews also characterized the death of the database as a turning point in Canadian life. "Unfortunately, Liberals and some New Democrats have attempted to turn a whole way of life into some kind of criminal conduct. That's really what the long-gun registry is about...attempting to criminalize a way of life."

Preach, brother Toews!

(Columbus, OH) – Protection of fishing, hunting, and shooting on national forest and public lands has taken a step forward with the Senate introduction of the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities Act. Introduced by Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), the measure is backed by the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, American Sportfishing Association, National Rifle Association, Safari Club International, Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, and others in the angling, hunting and wildlife conservation community.

The bill will protect fishing, hunting, trapping, recreational shooting and wildlife management practices on more than 400 million acres of public land across America managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The measure mandates that these public lands are open until closed for angling, hunting and shooting while enabling the agencies to make specific closures or restrictions determined to be necessary and supported by sound facts and evidence. The bill is patterned after the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act which made fishing and hunting "priority public uses" on federal wildlife refuge system lands and has helped protect fishing and hunting there from anti-fishing/anti-hunting zealots.

by Chad D. Baus

Recently, Grey House Publishing, based in Amenia, NY, sent me a copy of the Second Edition of Encyclopedia of Gun Control & Gun Rights. According to an accompanying press release, the first edition was published by Greenwood Press in 1999.

Reviewing an encyclopedia may seem a bit of a tall order, especially since, I will freely admit, I have not read the 550 page volume cover to cover. But encyclopedias aren't meant to be read page for page, but rather are to be used as a reference guide. I will also admit that, in this age of the Internet, I honestly hadn't realized encyclopedias were still being published. (Indeed, in the preface the authors credit the Internet as an "extremely valuable source of information [used] in preparing this book.") Judging by the press release, Grey House Publishing's primary target market for the volume is libraries.

The authors of the Second Edition of Encyclopedia of Gun Control & Gun Rights are Glenn H. Utter and Robert J. Spitzer. Despite the extensiveness of the volume, I had to go to the Internet to determine just who these men are.

Glenn H. Utter, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Lamar University, Texas. Utter was the sole author of the first edition of the encyclopedia in 1999. He has also written other articles and books, including The Evolving Gun Culture In America and Religion and Politics, which features a cover photo of the late Osama bin Laden.

Robert J. Spitzer is a political science professor at the State University of New York at Cortland. His other books include Gun Control: A Documentary and Reference Guide and The Politics of Gun Control. In the Chicago-Kent Law Review's Symposium on the Second Amendment in 2000, Spitzer argued against the notion that the Constitution recognizes an individual right to bear arms. Spitzer has also published an article at The Huffington Post in 2011 criticizing Students For Concealed Carry On Campus. (Note: SCCC isn't deemed worthy of an entry in the encyclopedia, but does get one mention in a lengthy entry about the Virginia Tech shooting. That entry concludes that a better way to have contained the violence at VT than concealed carry on campus would have been a better adherence to federal "requirements that educational institutions...publish a yearly report of campus security policies and crime data, and provide prompt warnings to the campus community about crime threads.")

Spitzer appears the encyclopedia he co-wrote, in an entry on Gary Kleck - the University of Florida professor of criminology and criminal justice whose research in the 1990's famously concluded that firearms are used defensively as many as 2.5 million times each year. Spitzer is listed in the encyclopedia entry as a critic of Kleck's, and citations to his book The Politics of Gun Control are listed in the Kleck entry as well as in a later entry on Suicide.

So now that we have established a better idea of who the authors are, let us consider what type of information they deem worthy of being included in the encyclopedia.

Columbus, OH – Central Ohio sportsmen and women who are interested in becoming Hunter Education Instructors are encouraged to register for a training workshop according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife.

The first workshop will take place on Saturday, March 10th and Sunday, March 11th, 2012. Training will be held at the Wildlife District One office located at 1500 Dublin Road in Columbus from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. each day.

Another workshop will be held in Akron (Portage Lakes) on Saturday, March 24th and Sunday, March 25th, 2012. Training will be held at the Wildlife District Three office located at 912 Portage Lakes Drive in Akron (Portage Lakes) from 8am-6pm each day.

There is no cost to participate in these Hunter education instructor workshops. Those interested in attending must register by calling 1-800-WILDLIFE (945-3543).

Participants must attend both days of training, be at least 18 years of age and have successfully completed a hunter education course. Ohio currently has 1,700 volunteer instructors who train thousands of hunters each year to be safe and responsible in the field.

by Larry S. Moore

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources' (ODNR) Division of Wildlife is holding open house meetings in all five districts to discuss season dates and bag limits of game species, which will include Ohio's most popular game animal, the white-tailed deer. The meetings will be Saturday, March 3, from 12 – 3 p.m. and are open to the public.

For many people the open houses are an opportunity to talk with the Division of Wildlife personnel. Sadly the attendance statistics reflect that most sportsmen stay home. Is this because Ohio's sportsmen think the Division is doing exactly what they desire? Or is it that Ohio's sportsmen are just too complacent to drive a few miles to the nearest open house? Judging by the letters to the Ohio Outdoor News the concerns are well articulated and debated. Writing a letter to the editor is easy in our electronic world. Driving an hour or more for a short meeting is much more difficult. But it is making the appearance and submitting your concern directly to the Division personnel that gets things moving.

A couple of dedicated hunters have been leading the efforts to bring rifles into the toolkit for Ohio's deer hunters. Buckeye Firearms Association Minutemen Dan Allen and Aaron Kirkingburg have spent hours researching material. They have attended previous open house events, met with Division of Wildlife personnel several times in 2011 and are presenting their case to sportsmen organizations. The upcoming open houses on March 3 could be pivotal in their efforts.