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Yes, I said it. Retard. I believe the term’s meaning has changed. “Going full retard” isn’t a slam against people who are genetically mentally or developmentally challenged. It now refers to ostensibly smart people doing something unbelievably stupid. If I’m wrong, tell me. If I’m not, the Cleveland City Council qualifies for the term. Despite the fact that the Ohio State Supreme Court ruled that The Buckeye State’s state gun laws preempt local laws – ’cause that’s the way they’re written – Cleveland is set to enact a new gun control ordinance that violates state law anyway. And how . . .

Some of the elements of the legislation being pushed by the city administration include requiring private sellers to report sales to police, prohibiting the concealed carry of handguns, which state law allows and requiring a gun owner to report a lost or stolen firearm to police.

I can’t find a link to the actual ordinance. (Thanks for nothing, local news media and clevelandcitycouncil.org.) Until and unless TTAG’s Armed Intelligenstia help me out, we’ll just have to assume that wkyc.com‘s got it right (autoplay video at the link).

This much we know: Cleveland City Council’s got it wrong. Americans have a natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. Any laws that infringe upon that right are illegal, immoral and, for all we know, fattening. It’s time for Cleveland and its ilk to go on a gun-law-free diet. As the state Supreme Court will no doubt remind them. Again. Still.

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60 COMMENTS

  1. It won’t last long if the Ohio state law is written correctly. Plus it might cost them some $$$$. That’s how the PA exemption law is written.

    • I think the Cleveland City Council should abandon the gun registry ordinance initiative in favor of an “Elected Official Registry” (EFR for short). The EFR would include similar info as proposed for the gun registry, to include the following: home address, fingerprints, name and aliases used, date of birth, sex, home or mobile phone number regularly used, photo identification, description of the elected official’s office held, other employer information if applicable, and the name of any educational institutions the official attends. Of course the EFR would be made available to the public via the internet with a prominent website link on the home page of the city’s web site. Many of these elected officials are a menace to society and pose a great danger to the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of Cleveland.

      • CORRECTION – EOR not EFR registry. Should have paid more attention on what I was typing. Not my fault though – attention deficit disorder at work (getting old).

    • State law is written correctly. They have gotten slapped down by the courts in the past over this. Even the anti-gun Cleveland PD has finally figured it out. Last year they sent out a notice to all their officers telling them not to harass open carriers and not to enforce city ordinances dealing with firearms that aren’t the same as what is in state or federal law.

  2. When you can pay for litigation and damages using other peoples money, and there is no personally impactful downside to doing so, who cares whether or not the laws you pass are illegal, immoral, or unconstitutional.

    • The point is you have to make government servants personally accountable and culpable for passing bad and unconstitutional laws and decisions every single time. Not a slap on the wrist. You have to make it hurt. Prison (real prison), fines, sanctions. It has to hurt in the same proportional manner that it does for the so-called “unwashed masses”.

      Other than a recent governor and wife that went to jail, that’s just not happening.

      Screw up the IRS, VA, ATF, etc and there are no criminal penalties for these “only ones”. Do you think Hillary is going to see any penalties for Benghazi, not permitting government IT to examine her personal email server, deleting email prior to an investigation, accepting money from foreign governments? You can bet those non-“only ones” would be in prison or worse if they committed those crimes.

      She’s running for president! Nobody in government is going to stand up and say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done to stop that criminal? How much longer are we going to tolerate these farces?

    • Florida put a fine and removal from office in our preemption statute. Legal fees and fines have to come out of the violating officials pocket.

  3. Instead of making state laws that void city ordinances, they should make state laws that make it a criminal offense to make city ordinances that violate state law, then they can round up the council members who voted for it and throw them in jail.

  4. Eventually, if constitutional carry gets pushed by the feds, all these state bans are going to get trumped when people take it to the supreme court.

  5. Hmm just sounds like they are typical politicos, so need to slam the intellectually disabled. Anytime you use the R-word as a derogatory label you are “doing it wrong”, but this is the USA. You have a right to go full “Archie Bunker”.

    • Oh please, take your SJW BS elsewhere. Calling somebody a retard only insults actual retards in the fact that they, unlike the subject of your insults, don’t have a choice about their stupidity.

      • It ain’t about social justice it’s about being responsible for your actions. As a father of a child with Down Syndrome, I can tell you that the R-word is just like the N-word. Use it and you are ignorant. Its your choice to be an ignorant just don’t act like you aren’t.

      • I like prog-tard …or left-tard. And years ago I worked in a state facility for the developmentally disabled. Sooo…I have insights a lot of folks wouldn’t.

    • Retardation is a perfectly viable term to describe the mentally retarded. Just because it took up popularity as an insult doesn’t mean we need to change how we speak to be more nice. The new words that replace the old “offensive” terms always end up becoming offensive too. So, in 10 years, when “special needs” is the new “retard”, should we stop using specail needs and create another brand new word?

      • I have already heard “special needs” used in derogatory fashion countless times. People need to get over the ideas that A) People have a right to never feel offended and B) The idea of “approved terms.” Thinking that you can control peoples’ thoughts with vocabulary is retarded.

    • Harley Davidson Panheads don’t have an automatic advance ( if you don’t know what that means you have bigger issues we can’t help you with ) You have to retard the spark, jump on the pedal and make it start, then put in some advance.

      full retard is for starting, then you advance it for running. you never go full retard when running.

      facts, decisions, in that order, please.

  6. Yeah… Tard is about right. (And, I rarely ever use that term.) It’s known as the mistake by/on the lake for a reason. I have always assumed that they think they are the NYC of Ohio. They pass stuff like this or their police department makes stuff up out of thin air. Activists defy the law. Standing is generated for court cases. The city fights tooth and nail. The city loses. Much money is spent and time is wasted. Rinse and repeat. We ship most of our progressives up there. That’s our leper colony.

    • Oh, come on, all it needs is an urban renewal project or two … Something in the 1-megaton range should do.

      (I lived there for four years or so…)

      • Then you have the headaches of the survivors whining about radiation sickness, flash burns, cancers, etc.

        Nice idea, just not very practical.

        Now sealing off the city and introducing a contagion on the other hand…

        *snicker*

  10. I have to laugh since passing the city ordnance’s are completely useless and void. The only thing the ordnance does is make gun folk wealthy from all the lawsuits. I hope the first guy who gets arrested and sues posts pictures of all his fancy new guns that he bought with lawsuit money!

    • Quite. A Cleveland cop who arrests or interferes with somebody simply because he is violating the city ordinance will be slapped with a §1983 so quickly their head will spin. And qualified immunity will be a weak defense when the Ordinance is so blatantly illegal.

    • Judge Corrigan wrote, “R.C. 9.68 clearly invalidates any and all municipal ordinances regulating ‘the ownership, possession, purchase, other acquisition, transport, storage, carrying, sale, or other transfer of firearms, their components, and their ammunition.'”

  12. You mean to tell me that this post has been up for nearly two hours and no one’s made a steamer joke yet?

  13. Cleveland Demographics: The racial makeup of the city was 53.3% African American, 37.3% White, 0.3% Native American, 1.8% Asian, 4.4% from other races, and 2.8% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 10.0% of the population.
    Hmmmm…

  14. Wait. That’s a VERY dangerous path you gentlemen propose we travel, holding deliberative bodies criminally liable for unconstitutional laws. I’m right there with you, frustrated and furious, and I want to take that path, too; but be aware it is not the yellow brick road.

    Yes, there should be consequences attached to willfully unconstitutional laws. Our civil servants shouldn’t pass ordinances, then dare us to challenge them at our own expense, while they defend them, also at our expense. Should we win, they just slightly tweak the law, and the bank draining game begins anew. PA’s law forcing localities to pay up for frivolously infringing on freedom is a great start in reining in that nonsense.

    [Stage direction: cue the sound of the other shoe falling.]

    There’s a real risk when you start talking criminal culpability, however. For starters, you’ll need a set standard against which to compare. Unfortunately, the law and life don’t always lend themselves to set standards. Many matters really do come down to reasonable men differing.

    Legitimate differences of opinion or interpretation of the law shouldn’t land you in jail. After all, if every aspect of the law were crystal clear and amenable to simple comparison to a standard, then courts across the country wouldn’t be filled with defendants every day. The Framers even built into the system the SC specifically to settle constitutional differences. If they had only unreasonable differences in mind, then they wouldn’t have bothered to construct the Court, as unreasonable people would act by force and not seek a court ruling, anyway.

    The real risk in attaching prison sentences to such matters, is in criminalizing what is rightly part of the political process. Don’t like the laws? Vote the bums out or take them to court, but don’t seek to criminalize the political process. Otherwise, the inevitable next step after criminal punishment bad laws, is criminal punishment for bad bills. We can call it “Attempted Unconstitutionality” and make it a felony (complete with forfeiture of firearms rights, in a delicious irony.) However, such a crime would be, as a practical matter, indistinguishable from “legislative debate” and “freedom of speech.” We all know what that road is paved with and where it leads, and it is not yellow bricks and Oz.

    The countermeasure you envision was actually contemplated and rejected by the Framers, for wisely seeing that the solution would be worse than the problem. This is the genesis of Article I, Section 6, of the U.S. Constitution.

    • It is difficult NOT to look at the “political system” in the light of criminal punishment, being as how SOOOO many “politicians” ARE criminals.

  15. The more desperate the anti’s get, the more idiotic the laws they pass. Makes it easier for the courts to sink them.

  16. I had the misfortune to reside in Cuyahoga County for 19 months. To give incite to those of you fortunate enough to have avoided Cleveland, let there be no mistake why it earned the nick-name, “Mistake on the Lake”. The highlight of their economic development plans during my residency was a two pronged feasibility study. Prong 1 was to study the cost to move the port a dozen plus miles up the Cuyahoga River which would require a massive dredging effort to get lake freighters and barges to the new port. Prong 2 involved moving the steel mill out of the city. The goal was to allow a developer to build luxury condos on the vacated lakefront.

    At the time, this would have involved closing the steel mill which was about the only place in town that was hiring and the port that was bringing in the iron ore for the mill. They eventually decided against it which was one of the few wise things they’ve ever done in that town.

    Bottom line, the City and the County have long believed that the Ohio Revised Code and the Ohio State Constitution don’t apply to them. This is just the most recent example of it.

  17. In Virginia our “Cleveland” is called Virginia Beach and we go through this about every two years or so.

  18. Time to get a shirt made up that reads I have 20 guns under my shirt and walk around Cleveland PD Headquarters with 30 handguns under my shirt.

  19. How about a backup state law that allows taxpayer to sue personally any city councilor that votes for or proposes such blatantly illegal laws. Currently they pass them knowing they are not personally liable to the cost inflicted on taxpayers when the inevitable law suits are filed.
    Only making those who do these things personally liable for their lawless acts will curb those acts.

  20. I am in complete agreement with the author’s point of view, but not with his choice of words. I doubt that parents and family members of mentally challenged persons would find seeing the word “retard” used in this context either pleasant or reassuring. I cannot help but think of former Senator Rick Santorum and his precious and severely handicapped daughter.

    • Word BIGOT!!!!! Is your fragile psyche offended??? Tuff, get over it!!! Defend the right to offend or loose all freedom!!! You’re willful ignorance hastens the hangman’s march…..

  21. I have lived in Ohio (Cincinnati area) since the day I was born.

    To us, Cleveland is “the Mistake on the Lake”. They can pollute rivers so much that they burst into flames.

    Wikipedia: “The Mistake on the Lake” may refer to Cleveland, a city in the US state of Ohio located on the southern shore of Lake Erie

  22. There is nothing to say they cant pass the laws, it just means they cant enforce them. What they do it for is so if they ever find a way around preemption then their laws are already in place. Colorado does the same thing.

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