In reaction to Mayor Michael Coleman’s showboating comments …"C&E, we are calling you out today. If you have a nickel of moral responsibility in your pocket, I ask you to spend it in Columbus. Require background checks on all privategun sales at your gun shows."

"C&E is the company that holds gun shows at Westland Mall," Coleman said. "Without the proper background checks, unlicensed private gun sellers will have the ability to sell to gangsters, criminals and drug pushers at the C&E gun shows.”…says Mayor Michael Coleman.

Mayor Michael Coleman is obviously speaking with great authority about something that he is very clearly ignorant about. Any fool that acts like he knows something when he doesn’t is aggravating, but a fool in a powerful political office is just dangerous.

He has evidently never set foot in a gun show. Of course, we run ethical and moral shows. There are families at the shows, police and ATF. Gun shows are great because of the huge selection and variety of guns and gun related accessories as well as experts on their use. They are safe, well lit with wide aisles and good concessions. That is why shows like the Westland Mall Gun Show attracts over 500 tables and 6,000 law abiding public average for a March Show.

Coleman sounds like another grandstanding politician unable to handle the communities crashing economy, budget, and soaring crime he lashes out at legal, legitimate businesses to deflect the blame from where it squarely lies on the politician’s doorstep. Mayor Coleman is like many anti-gunners grasping at straws, with ridiculous rhetoric like ‘we call you out.’

Like all good yarns, this one has a thread of truth that is being overspun. All Federal Firearms Licensed (FFL’s) dealers do background checks and most of the exhibitors with guns are FFL’s. Gun shows account for 0.7% of guns used in crimes, less than 1%. We get our numbers from The Department of Justice, the foremost authority on criminal behavior.

See the study sited below. The gun control advocates, like the grandstanding Mayor of Columbus and his associate Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have to use phony statistics because the truth does not support their agenda. It is ridiculous that gun shows remain a giant target for antigun groups, antigun media and lazy politicians when 99.3% of the crime guns come from other sources. Criminals don’t get their guns at gun shows. There are always police officers and ATF at the show. They are there to assure the sales are legal and they do their jobs well.

But Mayor Coleman also called on state legislators to return to cities the power to enact gun legislation. The legislators just changed these laws and they are not going to give it back. He called on the promoters of a gun show regularly held at Westland Mall to make sure those who buy guns there go through a check to ensure that nothing in their background prohibits them from owning a gun.

Mayor Coleman calls on us to do what he cannot get legislators to do because it against the wishes of the people, his constituency. He wants us to bypass The Second Amendment, all the other laws and law enforcement and somehow do this on our own. It is not legal. If we wanted to, which we don’t, we couldn’t do it. We would get sued. He does not understand that the public does not wish to have big brother watching their purchase of every gun.

The people with good reason do not trust the government. Throughout history, governments who register guns always show up at some future time to confiscate the guns and then kill some large group of people. For a summary of why the people don’t trust thegovernment to register their guns or them as gun owners, read the ‘Why not register guns?’ on our website

The state needs consistent gun laws statewide. That is why legislators took cities, counties and municipalities out of the picture. The citizens can’t keep up with smaller government entities making inconsistent laws that endanger their freedom and security. City leaderships often take an anti-gun stance because of a narrow focus on lower-class male-on-male violence. Unable to determine how to effectively control these violent groups they turn their frustrations to guns. Gang wars and violence are the failure of enforcement tactics and the need for effective judicial processes. To state it simply, the criminals need much more severe punishment.

Let’s start with where Michael Coleman’s alliances, mindset and contributions lie. Mayor Coleman is a member of the Mayors Against Illegal Gun Coalition, a bi-partisan group with a stated goal of "making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets." The coalition is co-chaired by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and New York City Mayor Bloomberg. We might add by going after law abiding citizens and their guns.

The Coalition is composed of mayors from both major political parties, the Progressive Party, and the Green Party and its statement of principles has received the endorsement of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Conference of Black Mayors. The majority of members of Mayors Against Illegal Guns are Democrats.

Acknowledging an "unacceptable spike in homicides last year," Coleman outlined Columbus' efforts to maintain what he says is still one of the safest cities in the nation, including spending 70 percent of the city's operating budget on safetforces.

Columbus is in the bottom 2% of safe cities in the United States. Your chances of becoming a victim in Columbus are 1in 119. Obviously the problems are multi-faceted and multi-layered. You need more guns, not less in Columbus. The citizens of Columbus need to be able to defend themselves. The extra police are an excellent first step, but it has to be followed up with very severe punishment or criminals are just going to laugh on. Weak punishment endangers the police and the citizens that these predatory animals released back out on. In the City of Columbus, is it true that criminals using firearms are supposed to get the maximum sentence automatically but that is always removed from sentencing procedures first? The police need to be backed up the court systems. That comes back to officials, like Mayors, who set the tone for prosecution, sentencing and make appointments.

Gary Kleck’s study on Defensive Gun Uses (DGU), National Crime Statistics, National Crime Survey, as well as The Ohio Statistical Analysis Center, Ohio Citizen Attitudes Concerning Crime and Criminal Justice among many others.

There are 5,000 gun shows a year in the United States. People from all walks of life attend: 10,000,000 public annually. Gun shows provide a great value because of competition between vendors. There is great selection and prices on firearms, accessories, holsters, ammo, safes, training, knives, stun guns, tasers, hunting supplies, army surplus, etc. and competition between exhibitors creates the lowest prices available. All the guns are tied and nobody is trying to shoot at you like in the projects. One of the largest reasons anti-gun politicians target gun shows is The First Amendment. These are assemblies of large masses of pro-gun citizens. The First Amendment is the real threat to anti-gun politicians at gun shows. We network and pro-gun groups campaign to get rid of bad politicians that threaten our freedom and security.

Lazy politicians make laws that go after gun shows and law abiding citizens because it's easy. It makes it look like they are doing something to prevent crime when they are just pandering. And they are beginning to look really stupid to everyone. Criminals don’t get their guns at gun shows. Gun Shows are not a criminal friendly environment at all. Black market guns are a lot cheaper plus ours have those pesky serial numbers on them. There are dozens of police officers through every show, in uniform and plain clothes. They are good customers. How many guys need three different kinds of holsters? There are literally thousands of people around including law enforcement working and shopping at the shows. Former and present day law enforcement as well as many active duty and retired military participate asexhibitors and customers.

If Mayor Coleman wants to take a bite out of crime, longer sentencing for criminals would be an excellent start. The federal government knows it. That’s why they forced states to make prisoners serve 80% of their sentences or the federal government would cut funding to the state prisons. You don’t see Coleman talking about that, it would require him to roll up his sleeves and have to go to work. Among prisoners carrying a firearm during their crime, 40% of State inmates and 56% of Federal inmates received a sentence enhancement because of the firearm. For violent criminals carrying a gun during a violent crime, it should be a mandatory sentence increase. The longer criminals are in the prison, the longer society is protected. It’s much easier to say, it’s the gun shows fault we have so much crime.

The police assigned to the gun shows will tell you it is a cake job, most the time they are bored. I do think the vast majority of the police would prefer to be chasing the criminals and are true heroes. Just maybe we should look at the other 99.3% of crime gun sources, before we go making anymore useless, ineffective laws that do nothing to stop crime but create an enormous waste of limited law enforcement resources and funds.

The harsher the punishment the lower the crime rates dip. It is a shame but usually liberal gun hating politicians are very lenient on criminals do not see the relationship between crime and punishment. These politicians have the power to appoint judges, lawyers and influence law making decisions that have great and horrible impacts on society.

Gun control fanatics want everyone to lay their guns down. They can force law abiding citizens to do so with aggressive laws, but the criminals never obey. Therefore these well-meaning gun control nuts endanger the law abiding descent citizens. They just can’t understand you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. The world is not all butterflies and rainbows. If they aren’t smart enough to understand criminal behavior they need to find another line of work, maybe the movies for Mayor Coleman considering his flair for theatrics.

The mental health infrastructure needs more money, meds, beds and physicians. There were huge federal budget cuts to the Mental Health under the Clinton Administration and the money was never restored. Not properly caring for the mentally ill is an egregious mistake. Allowing the mentally ill to prey on society is cruel to all parties involved. The mentally ill in this country are being mistreated and uncared for. A society should be judged by how it treats its poor and it’s mentally ill. Both the Virginia Tech and the Tulsa, Arizona massacres were obvious miscarries of treatment of the mentally ill and lands squarely on the mental health infrastructure’s mismanagement by our federal government and down through state and city levels. And society paid dearly for it. Our politicians are failing us miserably.

Isn’t there someone else out there that can get focused on fixing the problems of Columbus, like this huge budget mess. Someone who has some serious ideas about fixing crime instead of disarming law abiding citizens and causing harm to legitimate businesses deserves to be Mayor. Earl Smith is running for Mayor and has three decades of police experience and deserves a serious look. Everyone who is disgusted with Mayor Coleman needs to consider Earl Smith, put your money where your mouth is and donate to his campaign if you believe he is worthy.

As for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the great city of New York, successive and pronounced cycles of gang violence have been documented in New York City, reaching back well over a century. Social historian Eric Schneider has chronicled the trajectory of the serious and widespread gang problem that plagued the city from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, during the transformation of the city’s economy from war production and manufacturing to financial and legal services, insurance, real estate development, and civil service jobs (Schneider 1999). African American and Puerto Rican families migrating into the city faced a highly racialized labor market that systematically excluded them from wellpaying job categories and racial segregation that shunted them into older housing stock located in the poorest neighborhoods. Adolescent peer groups formed within crowded city schools competed outside of school with hostile ethnic groups for recreational space along neighborhood borderlines. According to the Justice Policy Institute, gang wars and violence are the failure of enforcement tactics and the need for effective public safety strategies.

Virginia State Attorney General, Bob McDonald, drafted a law and sent it to Bloomberg with a nice cover letter that told him if he came back to the great state of Virginia with his circus act he would have him prosecuted. Bob McDonald is now Virginia’s Governor. Ohio’s Attorney General could do something similar and let Bloomberg go play in some other states. The fact that Mayor Bloomberg received this very strong rebuke stating to cease and desist and he has chosen to ignore it traveling even further into other states once Virginia threw him out seems he believes he is above the law and he can do anything he wants. Mayor Bloomberg seems to think he is right and the rest of the country is wrong!

What results, if any, has spending 2.5 million dollars of tax payer’s money had on crime rates in New York City? Why didn’t he spend his own money on this crusade to disarm the American public instead of New York City tax payer’s money? Is this correct appropriation of city tax money for the City of New York to spend it in other states for some antigun tirade? Why doesn’t some member of the media investigate misappropriation of city funds? Why doesn’t the City of New York adapt a concealed carry permit like the rest of the country? That is proven to lower crime rates. Bloomberg is passionate about disarming everyone else, but you don’t seem him getting rid of his armed guards.

We have heard from the experts, Mayor Bloomberg should follow their advice instead of running off on some bizarre antigun tactic. It seems like he is more interested in showboating and getting his name in the lime light. Such is life in the ivory tower with armed guards circling at the bottom looking down at your peasants.