To the Editors:

I am sorry to read that my letter in the Oct. 11 Review left Ms. Broadwell “a bit confused” (“Ashenhurst’s Letter Requires Clarification,” The Oberlin Review, Nov. 1, 2013). I will attempt to clarify; alas, however, the situation will continue to be a complicated one.

Ordinance 13-44, in amending Section 927.07 of the Codified Ordi- nances, did not give anyone permis- sion “to carry firearms in city parks.” As we all saw in September, as Ohio- ans for Concealed Carry wanted to make perfectly clear, people with concealed-carry licenses have been permitted to carry firearms in Oberlin’s parks since 2004, and openly to carry in our parks since at least 2006. City Council was only “forced” to amend its 1998 ordinance in the sense a schoolyard bully forces a smaller kid to say “uncle” by twisting his arm behind his back.

Did City Council “do what it had to do to bring the city’s ordinance into compliance with state law?” No, in two respects: first, because no one had yet demonstrated any necessity, or even any urgency, to try to excise the nullified scrap of our 1998 law to bring us into “compliance” (as OFCC styles it) with subsequently enacted state law; and second, because, if OF- CC’s first legal complaint is to be be- lieved, we did not, with the passage of Ordinance 13-44, successfully achieve the “compliance” they sought.

And yes, City Council gave in too easily to the gun lobby. We could have stood alone, at least for a meeting or two, in the face of unpleasant pres- sure, but a narrowly-divided Council chose not to. Why? In part because it wanted “to avoid costly litigation.” That strategy has apparently backfired, and I did not consider such “avoidance” a particularly worthy tar- get in the first place (especially since there was no evidence that litigation against Section 927.07 would neces- sarily be very “costly”).

I called OFCC’s attack on 13-44 a “get-out-of-this-lawsuit-free” card because it was premature, coming as it did before the ordinance was in effect. OFCC’s president is quoted in The Plain Dealer on Oct. 16 as saying a referendum would be “a colossal waste of time because there is pending litigation that is challenging that very ordinance … How can you have a referendum on something that might not exist through the legal process?’’ The city’s response to this ought to be, “How can you subject to a legal challenge an ordinance that is not yet in effect, and therefore may never exist?”

Rescinding or tabling Ordinance 13-44 would have left OFCC with four other ordinances in its complaint. Three are not-yet-updated duplications of state law, and one is a badly edited duplication of state law. Not one of them enlarges nor contracts upon federal or state law regarding firearms.

Will the court consider OFCC’s calling attention to the fact that Oberlin’s codified ordinances are not continuously and instantaneously updated “prevail[ing] in a challenge” to a city ordinance? Does OFCC “pre- vail in a challenge” to a city ordinance when it discovers an editorial mis- take made by our codification com- pany (and if so, will the company pay their legal costs, or will we have to)? Stay tuned.

–David Ashenhurst
Oberlin resident