When Canton, OH Police Officer Daniel Harless distinguished himself during a recent traffic stop, the whole sorry scene was, fortunately, caught on his dashcam video. As you probably know by now, the video went viral, bringing the city of Canton a tad more notoriety that it probably wanted. Now comes Canton City Council President Alan Schulman who evidently wasn’t happy enough with the brushfire Harless started. Schulman thought it would be a good idea to throw a can of gasoline on top of it all…
Schulman was recently interviewed by WHLO radio. While he wouldn’t comment on the shocking disregard for the law by officer Harless, what seems to have gotten him really hot and bothered are all of the “out-of-town” emails and phone calls the city has been receiving. Not to mention the crushing inconvenience of the second amendment.
This is, in my judgment, a symptom of this arming, literally the arming, of a population with handguns. And the flooding of handguns into our communities.
These laws that allow our citizens to carry a concealed weapon at a university, in a school, in a bar where liquor is served, in automobiles, in the worst part of our neighborhoods, where there’s high crime, drugs, prostitution and someone is packing a Ruger at 1:30 in the morning…. That’s not acceptable in our society.
As long as people carry weapons under the worst of circumstances and in the worst situations, there are deaths waiting to happen. Either police officers or citzens who think by arming themselves, they’re somehow safe.
Schulman relayed this warning he said he gave a caller from Arizona:
If you allow the kind of carry concealed weapons laws that are in existence in Ohio, and they’re all over United States, you’re going to have the same problems over and over again and death will result.
And finally:
For those people who are going to say I am against guns, I am not against handguns, I’m not against people that hunt with weapons, but we all should believe in common sense, reasonable gun control laws that don’t allow this kind of thing to happen at 1:30 in the morning in a crime-ridden neighborhood with prostitution and drugs while we sit every week and listen to our citizens say, ‘we want to be protected.’
Well, we are being protected. And I know the police department and the safety director and the mayor will investigate this thoroughly. And that’s one of the benefits of having a video that allows our citizens some transparency as to what happens in these stops. But these laws are completely insane.
So the real problem here, according to the Council President, is that people “who think by arming themselves, they’re somehow safe” can legally carry a gun in their own car. The real problem is people who either live or work in neighborhoods Beaver Cleaver wouldn’t be caught dead in. The real problem isn’t that Officer Harless conducted himself like a jack-booted thug, violated a motorist’s Constitutional rights and threatened to execute a citizen who was licensed to carry a gun.
It’s good to hear, Councilman Schulman, that the people of Canton “are being protected.” The question is, who will protect the people of Canton from policemen like Daniel Harless?