CINCINNATI — Elected officials joined representatives from a variety of community organizations at Cincinnati City Hall on Thursday to announce a pair of ordinances aimed at improving local gun safety.
The first measure would create a city law that makes it illegal for anyone convicted of a domestic violence-related charge to possess a firearm.
While there are federal laws in place for felonies, this law would give the city a better ability to fine, prosecute and “get guns out of the hands of people with a history of abusive, violent behavior,” Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval said.
The mayor also announced a second measure that would create a legal requirement for gun owners to secure or lock their firearms.
The ordinance focuses on keeping guns out of the hands of children, according to City Solicitor Emily Smart Woerner, but she noted the application of the law would be “fact dependent.”
Both measures, which the city council must vote on, would be misdemeanors. They’d carry punishments of up to one year in jail, Pureval said.
The two ordinances will first go before the Public Safety and Governance Committee on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
“This is just common sense,” the first-term mayor said while surrounded by five city council members, the city’s police chief and dozens of community representatives.
They included doctors, religious leaders, victims of gun violence and organizations such as Moms Demand Action, a national grassroots movement advocating for gun law reforms.
“Families and communities in Cincinnati are all too familiar with the pain of gun violence,” said Anna Albi, a local volunteer with Moms Demand Action.
Across the country, guns — including accidental deaths, suicides and homicides — killed 4,357 children, ages 1 to 19, in 2020, according to data presented in the New England Journal of Medicine.
One such incident occurred Oct. 23, 2022, in Cincinnati’s Madisonville neighborhood, where Albi lives, when a 3 year old suffered an unintentional but fatal gunshot wound. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a Spectrum News partner, reported the boy’s father left the gun where the victim and a 6-year-old sibling could reach it.
In the weeks that followed, the Madisonville Community Council partnered with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office to distribute more than 100 gun locks in the community, along with education about secure storage. The Cincinnati Police Department offers free gun locks as well.
But Albi said it’s not enough.
“We must make unsecured firearm storage requirements and not an option,” she said.
Kristin Shrimplin, president and CEO, noted a statistic from the American Journal of Public Health stating an abusive partner’s access to a firearm makes it five times more likely that their partner will be killed by them.
Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge called these efforts potentially lifesaving. She said the legislation sends a simple message: “Responsible gun ownership is a must in our city.”
Council member Scotty Johnson, a retired Cincinnati Police Department officer, acknowledged he’s a gun owner. He said gun owners are welcome in Cincinnati. But he reiterated that owning a firearm comes with added responsibility, and a failure to follow through on them should have consequences.
Pureval admitted that even with the new legislation, the city has a lot of work to do to address what he called a gun violence epidemic.
There were 342 shootings in Cincinnati last year, a minor decline from the previous two years but still higher than in 2019, according to city data.
The data showed there’ve been 20 reported shootings in just more than the first month of 2023.
Pureval emphasized during the press conference that these efforts alone won’t put an end to gun violence. He promised the city would “vigorously go after additional gun safety measures when we have the power to do so.”
He voiced an unwillingness to wait on state lawmakers in Columbus to pass what they described as “reasonable” gun safety.
Currently, the state of Ohio has “broad and restrictive” preemption laws that prevent cities across the state from regulating firearms, Pureval said.
To that end, the city of Cincinnati sued the state last Friday, seeking that the preemption law be declared unconstitutional. Columbus has filed a similar law, Smart Woerner said.
Smart Woener added the city wrote its pending legislation in such a narrow way that it doesn’t envision the law being struck down by any potential legal challenges.
Cincinnati has only one Republican on City Council: Liz Keating, who co-sponsored the legislation. She compared the current string of gun violence across the country to the movie “Groundhog Day.”
“We wake up to the same story each and every day,” Keating said. She believes it should be up to individual cities, not the state and federal government, to take action on these fronts.
Council member Liz Keating, the lone Republican on City Council, said this is a city rights issue and should be handled locally.
She went on to voice a need for state and national policymakers to work together to pass reasonable gun legislation. @SpectrumNews1OH pic.twitter.com/jIAzsKkVMh
— Casey Weldon (@TheWallyWeldon) February 2, 2023
“We are the ones who know our city and know its pain and know its loss, not them,” she said. “We are the ones who should be making the decisions to protect our youth.”
Still, Keating recognized that some of her Republican counterparts in Columbus and Washington, D.C., may disagree on Second Amendment issues. But she invited them to take part in these “very practical, realistic solutions” to “protect our kids and keep our community safe.
“This is not taking away people’s rights [to own guns]. This is taking away those who abuse those rights,” she added.
Spectrum News reached out to the Ohio Republican Party and the National Rifle Association for comment on this story. As of publication, neither organization responded to a request for comment.
Among the dozens of community supporters in attendance Thursday was Whitney Austin, co-founder of Whitney Strong, an organization committed to finding common ground to end gun violence through responsible gun ownership solutions.
For Austin, the issue is personal. She was shot 12 times on Sept. 6, 2018, while entering the Fifth Third Bank headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. Four people suffered fatal gunshot wounds that morning, including the shooter, who was killed by police.
It’s unclear whether the new pieces of legislation could have done anything to prevent what happened to her on Fountain Square. But she attended the event at city hall to support the city’s efforts to take action to reduce gun violence.
Austin believes it is the type of “common sense” gun legislation that can bring people together — Republicans, Democrats, gun owners, non-gun owners.
“Gun owners don’t want people convicted of domestic violence to have guns. They’re trying to protect all of us from dangerous humans. Gun owners don’t want children to be hurt with their firearms,” said Austin. “These are very common ground policies that everybody supports. So I don’t buy into the divisiveness. This is a common ground set of solutions, and we’re going to make the city safer.”
She called it a “hopeful day” for Cincinnati.
“Most days we wake up to more news of victims of gun violence, and that’s devastating for our city and it’s devastating for the victim,” she said. “So, to have an entirely different story today, which is filled with hope that we can actually do something to stop gun violence, is really great.”
