Photo: Ohio Gun Owner’s Chris Dorr with Rep. Candice Keller and Rep. Ron Hood
Columbus, OH — Great news for gun owners in the Buckeye state yesterday when Republican Governor Mike DeWine caved to immense pressure from gun owners and signed Senate Bill 175 into law! This bill gave removed a law-abiding gun owners’ “duty to retreat” from an attacker and restored the right to Stand Your Ground!
Ohio’s previous self-defense laws were Castle-doctrine only, where the only places you were not required to retreat were your home or car.
So grocery stores, parking lots, churches, restaurants, or really anywhere Ohioans went outside of their homes, they had to prove to a jury or liberal judge that they had tried to retreat if they dared to use their gun against a violent attacker! But Senate Bill 175 did away with that insane wording and eliminated the “duty to retreat” in its entirety.
Anti-gun Republican Governor DeWine wasn’t happy to sign it, however. He drug his feet, only signing the bill on the last day he possibly could have. In fact, DeWine had previously said he would veto the bill if it made it to his desk!
But it turns out that with enough pressure, DeWine will do what gun owners tell him to do!
It must be odd for a sellout RINO like DeWine to actually take orders from the people of Ohio — you’d almost think he works for them or something!
Two Gun Rights Heroes Led The Charge
Representatives Ron Hood (District 78) and Candice Keller (District 53) introduced Senate Bill 175, but they didn’t just haphazardly decide to run a pro-gun bill. No, on the very day and hour that Mike DeWine had gone live at a press conference demanding gun control after the August 4th, 2019 murder spree in Dayton, OH, these two introduced their Stand-Your-Ground law!
Instead of cowering before their Republican governor — and using him for political cover as so many other spineless Republicans would have done to justify doing nothing for gun owners — these two went to political WAR with their anti-gun Republican governor!
The pro-gun champions pointed out that Ohio’s lack of a Stand-Your-Ground law actually encouraged violent killers by requiring lawful citizens to attempt to retreat from a violent criminal before defending themselves. Keller and Hood were fearless as they used their Stand-Your-Ground bill to mobilize gun owners.
DeWine was not happy, as he had filed his own gun control bills, including SB 221, and wanted to use the momentum from the Dayton shooting to ram his gun control agenda into law.
But Representatives Hood and Keller created enough of their own pro-gun momentum to defeat DeWine’s gun control bill completely and instead ADVANCED Ohio’s gun rights!
They Did It With Some Help From Their Friends
From the beginning, Hood and Keller worked hand-in-glove with Ohio’s biggest and most powerful gun rights group, Ohio Gun Owners. The organization boasts a no-holds-barred, ‘no compromise’ approach, and it was obvious that they were they only game in town when it came to pushing this bill through.
The group mobilized their grassroots followers, telling them to pour the heat onto the Statehouse — and that’s exactly what Ohio gun owners did!
Over the course of this Ohio General Assembly, the members and supporters of Ohio Gun Owners poured more than 650,000 emails into the legislative offices in Columbus!
But they did not stop there. The legislature passed the bill on December 18th and delayed in sending it to Governor DeWine for signature until December 23rd.
Once it was on his desk, other gun groups gave up hope, refusing to rally their members to pressure DeWine into signing the bill — after all, DeWine said that he was going to veto it!
Only one Second Amendment group poured pressure onto DeWine: Ohio Gun Owners. And in the six days that the bill sat on DeWine’s desk, Ohio Gun Owners’ members and supporters HAMMERED DeWine with 75,000 emails DEMANDING he sign the bill!
Grassroots Gun Owners Won BIGLY!
Chris Dorr, the executive director of Ohio Gun Owners replied to our request for a comment, saying:
“This is a great success for our army of members and supporters. Ohio was the hotbed of radical howls for gun-control in America after the Dayton shooting, so for us to not only trash-can DeWine’s gun-control bills and instead fight back so hard that we repealed Ohio’s nasty ‘Duty to Retreat’ law shows the dominance of the Ohio Gun Owners army.”
Ohio’s new-and-improved Stand-Your-Ground law goes into effect in 90 days. From now on, gun owners will not be forced to retreat in the face of a violent attacker if they are out in public, at restaurants or grocery stores, or walking home from church.
Ohio’s gun owners can give themselves one heck of a slap on the back for standing up to their RINO governor and getting the job done! This is exactly how grassroots politics should work and we’re proud as hell of them!