For the past three weeks, the city of Columbus, Ohio has been enforcing several local gun control ordinances, including a ban on 30+ round magazines that comes complete with a six-month jail sentence. While the local politicians behind the new laws claim they were put on the books to improve public safety, the real impetus behind the measures is to challenge the state’s firearm preemption law; which leaves the state legislature as the sole authority to set a uniform body of gun laws across the state.
LEPD Firearms and Range co-founder Eric Delbert joins today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co to talk about how these new ordinances are impacting law-abiding gun owners, as well as what gun owners are doing to push back on the anti-gun efforts.
In court, that involves groups like Buckeye Firearms Association and other 2A orgs supporting Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who’s currently defending the preemption law after Columbus and Cincinnati recently imposed their own local restrictions. But Delbert and other Second Amendment supporters are also poking at the city officials who crafted the ban on 30+ round magazines, declaring themselves to be proud “29ers” and mocking the arbitrary designation of 30 rounds as the point where a magazine becomes “large capacity.”
“They came out and in their wisdom said that any magazine that can hold 30 rounds or more is bad, and we need to stop possession of those in order to clean up our streets,” Delbert said. “So we said okay, these are our elected officials who, you know, are of high intelligence, so we came out with a product that limits those magazines to 29 rounds. Because 29 is apparently okay. 30 is when the whole thing comes in with the badness on the streets.”
In addition to offering up “29er”-branded magazine inserts and t-shirts, Delbert says that LEPD is also offering to store any 30+ round magazines for Columbus residents while the litigation over the ban continues. The gun store and range is surrounded by the city of Columbus, but Delbert says the building itself is not actually inside the city limits, so once they’re on LEPD property the magazines will be safe from any potential confiscation on the part of local police.
Delbert doesn’t expect that enforcement of the new local ordinances is a big priority for most street cops, but the same can’t be said for the officials who put the ordinance in place. Not only do they want to see the new ban strictly enforced, they’re hoping that this is just the opening round of a barrage of anti-gun ordinances lobbed by Democrat-controlled cities throughout the state. Given that the Ohio Supreme Court has upheld the state’s firearm preemption law on two previous occasions, Delbert believes that the latest attempt to undo the law will also eventually fail, but in the meantime he and other Second Amendment supporters will continue to call out the mayor, city attorney, and city council members for falsely promising a safer city at the expense of a constitutionally-protected right.
Make sure you check out the entire conversation with Eric Delbert in the video window below, which also touches on the city’s ridiculously redundant ordinance banning straw purchases of firearms and what the local media’s rather one-sided coverage of the ordinances and the anti-gun politicians promoting them. I appreciate Eric’s time today, and here’s hoping that the courts will soon render the latest attempts by Columbus and Cincinnati latest to void the state’s firearm preemption law irrelevant and unenforceable.