Cincinnati Enquirer
08/29/2003

Madisonville man killed over his custom rims, prosecutor says

Timothy Powell Jr. loved his white 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass, spending hours dressing it up with racing flag decals and $4,000 of 20-inch gold custom rims.

Jerome Brown and six of his friends also loved it, Hamilton County prosecutors say. So much so that Brown, 19, is accused of rounding up his buddies in Dayton, Ohio, and driving to Cincinnati, casing Powell's car in the Club Ritz parking lot and following him to Madisonville, where police say Brown killed him.

"It was a flashy car and it had fancy gold rims that attracted attention," Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Brad Greenberg said during Brown's aggravated murder trial in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court this week. "Unfortunately the night of Sept. 17, 2001, it attracted the wrong type of attention."

Brown has denied the robbery and killing.

Othello Harrell, one of Brown's accomplices, accepted a plea deal in the case and is spending 12 years in prison. In testimony at Brown's trial, he detailed how his friend was the gang leader and the ruthless shooter who killed Powell for his car.

Powell had just dropped off friends Madisonville in the early morning hours of Sept. 17, 2001, when the gang hemmed in his vehicle with three of their own.

Desperately, Powell put his car in reverse in a vain attempt to escape. He avoided crashing into one of the gang's cars but was confronted by Harrell and Brown and another gang member, all of them flashing guns.

"Dude tried to back up," Harrell said of Powell. "(We) tried to block him in.

"(Brown) was shooting. The driver wouldn't stop, so Heddy was just busting it (shooting)."

Sparkling, spinning and other high-end tire rims for cars and trucks increasingly have become a target for thieves, which have led to assaults and occasionally death in Ohio.

While it remains relatively rare for violence to erupt over custom car wheels in Cincinnati, police elsewhere have seen a spate of violence this year connected with the expensive accessory. James "Tony" Gordon, 27, was shot to death in Dayton, Ohio, three weeks ago by a man who commented about the rims on his 1987 Ford Thunderbird at an intersection, police said. No arrests have been made.

Click here to read the entire story in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Click here to read "Shooting detailed at murder trial" in the Cincinnati Post.

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Fleeing carjacking victim shot in Dayton - AGAIN!

Columbus: Yet another carjacking victim who couldn't ''drive off''

Two more innocent victims who couldn't just ''drive off''

Summit Council member Kim Zurz accepts state post
Akron Beacon Journal

State Democrats picked Summit County Councilwoman Kim Zurz to be the new state senator for the 28th District, which includes southern Summit County and all of Portage County.

She will replace term-limited state Sen. Leigh Herington, D-Rootstown Twp., who is resigning Sept. 17 to run for a Portage County judgeship. Zurz will run for election next year.

Zurz won out over Portage County Commissioner Chuck Keiper and former state Rep. Tom Seese for the position.

DiDonato couldn't be reached late Thursday to explain why the party picked Zurz.

OFCC PAC Commentary:
Sen. Leigh Herington sat on the committee which amended HB12 in the Senate. He has a history of pro-concealed carry votes. OFCC PAC will be contacting Zurz to inquire if her constituents can expect the same support for self-defense rights from her as they have been accustomed to.

Click here to read the entire story from the Akron Beacon Journal.

It's doubtful that many who visit this site are given to thinking about what the anti-self-defense extremists will do with all their spare time after Ohioan's constitutional right to self-defense is restored.

If the activities of a few extremists in Minnesota are any indication, they may decide to put themselves in a great deal of danger.

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

BELLEVUE, WA – A recently published list of the "Top Ten States" that export guns used in crime was obviously meant to promote increased restrictions on gun sales, but an analysis of the states listed more clearly demonstrates that such laws don't work, said Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

The anti-gun Americans for Gun Safety listed Virginia, Georgia, California, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and Alabama, in that order, as the worst ten states for "exporting" guns later found to be used in crimes.

But Waldron quickly noted that at least three of those states have in place the kind of restrictive gun laws promoted by anti-gun groups as framework legislation to keep guns out of criminal hands. Virginia—rated first on the Top Ten list—has had a one-gun-a-month law on the books for eight years. California, in third place, requires all gun sales to go through a licensed dealer, so there is a background check performed. In ninth place, North Carolina requires a permit, issued by a sheriff following a background check, for every handgun sale.

"Those laws, in combination, are intended to prevent gun trafficking or identify gun trafficking, and they haven't worked," Waldron noted. "If such laws don't work in those three states, why would anyone other than a snake oil salesman suggest they might work in the other seven on that 'Ten Worst' list, or for that matter, any of the 47 other states?"

"Of course," Waldron continued, "anti-gunners overlook these nagging little details in their push for more restrictive gun laws. Their own list puts the lie to arguments that their panacea gun law proposals would stop or reduce gun crime, and prevent criminal access to firearms. All their proposed laws are really designed to do is further restrict the firearms rights of law-abiding citizens, and turn more legal gun owners into paperwork felons."

OFCC PAC Commentary:
Proof positive that restrictive gun control laws in many of Ohio's cities appears every day in the headlines.

And, most unfortunately, proof that Ohio's ban on bearing arms for self-defense only hurts innocent citizens appears on the obituary pages.

Click here to read "Gun-control group says Ohio is 'iron pipeline'" in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Each of Ohio's major newspapers willingly published the 'Top Ten' story - let's see how many print this other major headline from the report.

After reading this summary of the regulations required to purchase a firearm in Ohio, as published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, you'll realize the real question everyone should be asking is:

Why should ANYTHING anti-gun groups say be taken seriously?

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

The federal government is once again guilty of irresponsibility when it comes to the safe storage and protection of firearms.

The Dayton Daily News is reporting that more than 1,000 artifacts are missing from the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton.

Auditors reported three Russian-made 23 mm anti-aircraft cannons missing in March 2002.

On the latest list: Bombs, bomb fuses, and guns.

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

Rick Jones, OFCC PAC Senate District 14 Coordinator, had two letters to the editor published recently:

Citizens should support concealed carry - Zanesville Times-Recorder

Portsmouth Daily Times - Hand guns should be legal for family protection

If you live in Senate District 14, which is represented by Senator Doug White, please contact Rick at rljones@zoomnet.net)

The 2003 National Crime Victimization Survey, which is released by the Dept. of Justice, reveals long-term declines in victimization are at the lowest per capita rates in nearly 30 years.

Highlights:

* Overall violent victimization and property crime rates in 2002 are the lowest recorded since the inception of the NCVS in 1973.***Footnote 1: Based on adjustments to pre-1992 estimates to account for the 1992 redesign of the NCVS.***

* In 2002 the rate for rape was 0.4 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, 60% of the 1993 rate.

* For the decade the rate for robbery was down 63%, falling to 2 per 1,000 in 2002.

* From 1993 to 2002 victimization by aggravated assault, associated with serious injury or weapons, declined 64% to 4 per 1,000. The rate of simple assault -- a crime that involves neither serious injury nor weapon -- fell 47%.

* The rate of violent crime dropped 21% from the period 1999-2000 to the period 2001-02.

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In the past 20 years, a "right to carry revolution" has swept much of the nation, leaving a handful of states like Ohio in the age of defenselessness and victimization.

Ohio's gun grabbers claim that "more hidden, loaded guns" on our streets will lead to more violence. But the facts from NCVS prove otherwise. In the same time that violent crime has fallen to record lows, hundreds of thousands more firearms have been put on the nation's streets in right to carry states, in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

The gun grabbers won't like this NCVS data either:

Last year, 93% of violent crimes against innocent citizens were carried out without the criminal use of a firearm. 96% of rapes and 75% of robberies were committed by criminals without firearms. So why is the anti-gunners' answer to violence is to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain firearms, or the right to bear them for self-defense?

If their real goal was to prevent violent crime, groups like the Million Mom March-Brady Campaign-Handgun Control Inc. would be fighting for the right to choose armed self-defense instead of spending all their time, money and effort preventing the 4% of rapes in which a firearm was misused.

Click here to read the 2003 National Crime Victimization Survey.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) admits that criminal gun violence is making many of it's urban members "prisoners in their own homes".

Their answer to members who would wish to carry a concealed firearm for self-defense? While they offer a lot of Clintonian (or should we say Taftonian?) rhetoric about supporting citizens' right to own firearms, their legislative answer is to spend membership dollars to "eliminate gaps in and strengthen enforcement of the
Brady Act and other federal gun laws."

If you're an AARP member, or are considering becoming one, please consider instead becoming a member of Ohioans For Concealed Carry, or donating to OFCC PAC. What good are prescription drug benefits if you are defenseless when attacked?

Click on the "Read More..." link below to read the entire position statement from the AARP.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Tom Beiting was heading for work one day when, realizing he had left something at home, he returned to his apartment and found a stranger walking out.

The man held a portable television in one arm and a case of beer in the other.

The intruder dropped the items and reached for a knife tucked in his pants pocket. Beiting, a criminal-defense lawyer, also packed a weapon - a .380-caliber pistol clipped to his belt under his suit jacket.

Pointing the gun at the man's face, Beiting yelled, "Freeze!" The man froze.

"His eyes got huge. … Then he actually wet his pants," said Beiting, of Newport, Ky.

Every day in America, a civilian brandishes a gun to stop a crime. But, you wonder, just how often?

OFCC PAC Commentary:
Isn't it the anti-gun, anti-self-defense bunch who are always touting new gun control laws on the idea that it's worth it if it saves even one life?

So what difference does it make to them if the annual number of defensive gun uses is Gary Kleck's 2.5 million, or the NRA's "over 2 million", or even an ridiculously low 60,000 per year, as the anti-self-defense extremists claim?

Concealed carry reform saves lives. Hundreds of thousands of lives? Millions of lives? One life? To use the anti-self-defense extremists' own logic, it shouldn't much matter.

(Again, from the news article):
"Still, the debate matters a lot to Beiting, the Kentucky lawyer who pulled his gun on the knife-toting burglar.

Beiting, who had a state permit to carry the pistol, held the frightened man at bay until police came.