Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medda Mutual dotcom slash Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community, Morad PorterWright Dotcom and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online.

At O H E A dot org, Ohio prepares for a possible armed march at the state house with a new so-called Stand Your Ground law taking effect in a few weeks.

And millions of Ohioans will soon be eligible for the covid vaccine, though some are questioning how the priority list was drawn up all this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler this weekend, the state house is boarded up and mostly locked down as armed marches are expected on the grounds state capitols around the country.

There's some reporting that suggests Columbus is a specific target.

Governor Mike DeWine is ordering state buildings closed Sunday through Inauguration Day, reopening Thursday.

And there's extensive fencing on Capitol Square, along with a significantly increased troop presence.

The sad truth is that there are people in our country.

Who want to turn peaceful protests?

Into opportunities for violence.

These are violent people.

And their violence will not be tolerated in Ohio.

And it will not be tolerated anymore.

DeWine is also calling up 700 members of the Ohio National Guard to head to Washington, D.C., an increase of 500 over his initial commitment.

They'll join about 20 thousand National Guard troops in providing security at the Capitol.

Five hundred and eighty OSG personnel will be available to help with security around the state of Ohio, which is far fewer than the twelve hundred who were deployed in Ohio communities last summer as the protest over the killing of George Floyd continued.

Meanwhile, the pandemic rages on.

There have been nearly 9000 confirmed covid deaths and well over seven hundred thousand confirmed cases.

Thousands of Ohio frontline health care workers, first responders and nursing home staff and residents have gotten at least one dose of the cold vaccine, and a new group will be eligible in a few days.

But there are some questions about how those who are first in line are getting to be their statehouse correspondent.

Jo Ingles reports.

About two point two million Ohioans will be in the one B group, the next to get the vaccine.

The CDC says anyone over 65 should be able to get the vaccine, but there's limited supply in Ohio has a goal of getting kids in school.

So starting Tuesday, Ohioans 80 years old and older can get it on the 25th, people over 75 and those with certain congenital, developmental or early onset medical disorders can get it.

On February 1st, the cutoff age goes down to 70 and K through 12 school employees are included, provided the school is or will do in person or hybrid learning by March 1st.

Then on February 8th, anyone 65 or older can get it.

The state's first priority had been with health care workers and first responders, but police were not included with employees and firefighters in that first group, and they haven't been included in the second group of school employees either.

That means a community resource officer who works in a school could get the vaccine before counterparts who work on the streets.

Why is it so important that the teachers jumped ahead of law enforcement?

And law enforcement and EMS folks are really the the most.

Largest group of folks are contacting people every day.

I mean.

Ms.

Guy's got a lot of calls.

Typically, cops are on the same calls and most guys are on in addition to teachers, the one big group also allows Ohioans with some developmental disorders or some physical illnesses to get the vaccine.

But some illnesses are not included, such as cancer.

It's clear that cancer patients do have an increased risk of severe illness linked with the 19.

And so the American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network certainly believe that cancer patients should be among the groups that prioritize vaccination.

There's also some vaccine reluctance.

At one point, only 40 percent of workers in long term care facilities were opting for the shot, many rejecting it based on misinformation or disinformation.

They see on social media that the government is putting microchips in you or the government putting a vaccine out there that hasn't been properly studied and they rushed it to market.

Of course, those claims are false.

Pete Van Runkel says most nursing homes won't require vaccines because they're already short staffed.

He expects many workers who declined the vaccine at first will get it the second time around after seeing others who received it are faring well.

And in at least one Ohio facility, the vaccine rate is 100 percent for residents and staff.

This was the mentality.

This is what we're doing.

This is what I expect.

And I'm sure I will educate.

I will ask questions.

I will bring in the medical director.

I will know all that kind of stuff.

But at the end of the day, this is what we're doing.

And and it worked for the distribution of the vaccine to the general population is falling on local communities.

They determine how to sign up, participate and where to receive the shots.

Marion County, like many bigger counties such as Cuyahoga and Franklin, is opting for a massive drive thru shot clinic where there's no risk of transmission of disease.

Even now, we want to minimize that.

It also allows the most efficiency we can do a very high volume of throughput in a very short period of time with the Drive Dreiser mechanism.

So ours is at our county fairgrounds.

We will be directing seniors to register at an online link.

Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center plans a shot clinic at the shot the Schottenstein Center.

The state says around 800 health departments, pharmacies and other providers will be vaccinating the 420000 Ohioans over 80 this coming week.

And Ohioans can find those locations by zip code through a link on the state's coronavirus website, Jo Ingles Statehouse News Bureau.

Last week, Gov.

Mike DeWine signed the so-called Stand Your Ground law.

It removes the duty to retreat for someone who feels threatened before using deadly force in a public place.

The law doesn't take effect for 90 days, but it's top of mind with that armed march planned at the state House this weekend, including for the Republican representative who sponsored the provision.

I talked with Representative Kyle Kaler in our studio at a six foot distance this week.

Why do you think it is important to remove the duty to retreat that this bill does?

Right.

Well, again, thank you for saying.

Do you treat everybody refers to a stand your ground.

Some folks shoot to kill.

We indeed remove the do you retreat, which if you understand what we did, you have to understand two things.

You have to understand not only the three conditions that the Ohio Supreme Court set forth for how, how and when you use deadly force.

And you also have to understand the castle doctrine.

So duty retreat is part of the three conditions set forth by the Ohio Supreme Court.

First one is you can't be the aggressor, the instigator or causing the issue.

The second is you have to believe that you are in immediate danger of serious bodily harm and death.

I'm going to say that so many times today it's not funny.

And the third is that you didn't have a duty to retreat with the castle doctrine.

You don't have to retreat.

All we did was pass an amendment and Senate bill one seventy five.

That said, the third condition to do your retreat is not something you have to do if you're lawfully allowed to be in a certain place.

So this is in a public place, though.

Castle doctrine really relates to people's homes.

This is in a park and in any public place.

That's correct, because if you're lawfully allowed to be there, the thought and again, the governor had said in twenty eighteen that this was something we need to clear up, because when you're in a place that you're allowed to be deciding in a situation that is going to be high risk or high, high tension, you have to decide, can I retreat?

I think of the guy in a public place like a church where he's standing near the exit and all said a parishioner stands up like has happened in the past with a firearm, starts pointing at people.

That gentleman who may have.

Concealed carry, who's standing near the exit?

Does he have to decide, do I have can I can just slip out this door and I'm fine?

Or if I choose to be the hero and do something, am I going to get in trouble because I didn't leave the situation?

So do you retreat is something you have to decide.

Again, we've had a castle doctrine since 2008.

It applies to your automobile.

People are saying we have the Wild West now that we've amended this bill.

In reality, since 2008, we haven't had the Wild West with road rage.

There are instances where people do things silly and deadly, but we haven't been shooting up cars and stuff like that because somebody passed me on I 70 coming in today.

You talk about some of the names that the bill is called Stand Your Ground Kill.

It will.

Minority Leader Amelia Sykes in the House is among those very critical.

She wrote in a statement, There's nothing worse than a coward.

Only cowards would pass and sign a bill that has been proven to disproportionately harm black people.

Only cowards would support a bill that allows people to shoot first and ask questions later.

The blood of the lives lost from the signing, a passage of this bill or a solely on those who supported it.

So what do you say to people like her who are very concerned about this idea of dangerous situation being disproportionately applied to people of color?

If you look at Florida and you look at the Stand Your Ground law, they have and I think they do have a true Stand Your Ground law, I'm not too sure it's just due to retreat.

But eight percent of the time, it is a person of color that uses this defense to to justify what they did.

So if you look at the white counterpart, they're not using as much as a person of color.

So in in the state of Florida, which has had this for a long time, and they've had some mistakes, this is used more often by people of color than it is their white counterparts.

But that particular law, I believe, was one that George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Right.

And again, Stand Your Ground and repeatedly duty retreat and House bill three eighty one offered by Hood and killer.

In the last year, it had a number of things that this simple repeal did not have.

They had civil and criminal immunity.

They had the ability to draw the firearm, to de-escalate a situation which I think is extremely dangerous for a police officer who comes on to a scene and two people are pointing a gun at each other.

So I don't know what Florida's law looks like, but I think it's a full Stand Your Ground law.

The RAND Corporation has reviewed seven studies that show evidence the Stand Your Ground laws may increase total homicides, that that it's a moderate.

They've determined that there's moderate evidence of that and also that such laws may increase firearm homicide rate.

So when you look at the possibility that these studies are saying that violence and gun violence in particular could increase under this, aren't you concerned?

I am.

I am always concerned.

But at the same time, gun violence, it's a lot of times statistics that are brought to us in our committees.

A lot of it is gun violence and it doesn't separate a homicide from a suicide or from a domestic.

We're talking about this.

We're talking about specifically somebody defending their life in a situation where they believe they are in immediate danger of bodily harm or death.

So gun violence is a broad spectrum.

A lot of guns have been sold in the past two years and a lot in the last couple of days, as a matter of fact.

Absolutely.

Well, yeah, I think I remember seeing them disappear in the fall in this past summer.

But the fact of the matter is those guns aren't jumping out of people's pockets and shooting people.

Even though we've had an enormous increase.

We don't have that enormous increase in gun violence either.

We already have too much.

I understand that.

But we haven't seen that move with the number of guns being purchased.

We talk about gun violence.

Governor Mike DeWine had hinted he might veto this bill and it said that he wanted state lawmakers to look at his strong Ohio bill that he had proposed after the Dayton mass shootings, specifically on the weapon under disability.

The idea that this information needs to go into state national databases so gun dealers don't sell these guns to people who shouldn't have them, isn't it?

That is not something that lawmakers should be taking up.

I think.

I think that can't be done.

There is a push inside the gun rights organizations that worry that if I if somebody did something to their child one day and they're charged and that goes into the database as if it probably should, when does it come out?

And so there's if we can fully define what we're trying to do with some of his initiatives, I think gun owners will be more responsive.

But again, every time we do that, you will hear gun, right?

Folks say that's the camel's nose under the tent.

They're just beginning that.

The fact that he wants to add a way for me if I want to sell you a firearm, that I would like to check on your background and make sure you are not on disability.

I think that's good.

I would love to be able to sell somebody one of my guns and know for a fact that they're not.

Disability, the problem is.

The gun owners think the only way you can do that is if you start registering every single gun that somebody owns.

So again, it's that long game that people are worried about.

I'm I am all for the governor's initiative to increase penalties for somebody who uses a firearm under disability, somebody who knows that they're not allowed to have one, but they have one anyhow.

And people know that it's not it's not a oh, I didn't know I couldn't be doing this today.

You know, that I'm all for increasing that.

That's something we need to look at more.

More than half of states do have some sort of a Stand Your Ground bill, as I understand it, five states where the thirty six state.

But there are still people who view this as extreme, that this is a step too far.

I will tell you that, like I said before, the colleagues in my caucus were concerned about House Bill three eighty one.

There was the argument made that thirty five other states have this.

We should be able to do it.

Two, three eighty one, as it was written, was one of would have been one of the most extreme out of thirty five states.

As a matter of fact, my one colleague said it would be the most extreme.

So yes, again there's a very degree when we talk about repealing do you treat Stand Your Ground, shoot to kill, we all we did was remove one of the conditions.

If you're walking down the street and you're confronted what you can do or if you're in a church or other public place or restaurant, this becomes really real when you start talking about there was a protest outside the state house on January 6th.

There are reports of a planned armed march on the state House this weekend.

Michigan has banned open carry in their state house.

And we don't have Kerry in the state house, you can see.

Right?

Yes, right.

In light of all this, how do you feel about how this bill, though it hasn't taken effect yet, could be viewed by people who might be coming here?

And also, you had proposed removing some of the requirements for training for concealed carry permits.

How do you feel about that now?

I still believe that anybody who carries a firearm, whether it's open, carry, concealed carry, needs to do two things.

They need to know how to use that firearm to be safe with it, to understand how dangerous dangerous the training is for though the training for.

And they also need to understand the law.

There are too many people that I talked to that think because they own a firearm, they're no Barney Fife and they can try to go out and stop a bank robbery.

That is not what the Ohio law says in any way, shape or form.

With that being said, there's nothing in the US Constitution, the Ohio Constitution that I found that says to be able to protect yourself with a firearm or any deadly weapon that you need to get yourself fingerprinted, take a class, pay a fee, ask permission from the sheriff.

There's nothing in there that says that.

So I have to weigh those two things.

As you know, when we were doing concealed carry, I tried to put in a requirement that you just have a pamphlet that tells you how to get to this document.

And I was laid out by the gun folks because I was teaching duty to retreat.

Well, we fix that now, but I think anybody who carries a firearm should do that this weekend.

You know, if I was an Alabama fan or high state fan, I wouldn't travel to Alabama and have a parade for Ohio State today.

And I wouldn't if I was Alabama, I wouldn't come to Columbus.

I think it's the wrong time to do this if the tensions are going to be high.

Obviously, people from just this past week, I think people from both groups were here, both sides of this argument.

It is it is not a good time to be doing this.

It's just.

Not necessary, is there ever a good time for an armed marginal status?

I I participated in a 2009 Tea Party march on Washington, I think they were close to a million people there when we left the place look better than when we got there.

People prayed in front of the Capitol.

Nobody tried to go into the Capitol.

I don't know what can happen and who's going to be here.

I just think this is not the time, not the place.

I also spoke with Douglas Rogers, an attorney and volunteer with the gun regulations advocacy group Moms Demand.

I don't like much.

The defense said it wasn't the most extreme one in the country, but the provision that I think is truly extreme, in addition to, I think, eliminating the duty to retreat when you're in public is a bad provision.

But when it says the jury can't even consider whether in determining whether the shooting was necessary, can't consider whether you could have retreated.

That makes the an impossible for a prosecutor to prove that there was not imminent danger.

So I think that provision is extreme.

And to say that it's not an extreme provision when the chiefs of police are the six major cities in Ohio, the executive director of Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and the chief of the the Association of Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, which includes rural districts, too, they all opposed it.

And you would normally think that if a law pertaining to guns was opposed by the prosecuting attorneys, the chiefs of police, there'd be no reason to adopt it.

So they thought it was extreme.

There were a lot of dire predictions about when the castle doctrine was enacted in Ohio and said that that was those predictions never really came true.

So the idea that this is now the Wild West in Ohio is is maybe worrying about something that won't happen because we didn't have huge incidents of, say, road rage involving guns in Ohio after the Castle Doctrine was expanded to cars.

Well, I don't quite know how to respond to that because it's clear that over the last year, gun violence has dramatically increased.

So to say that the changes in self-defense law that we've had the castle doctrine for the House for one hundred years, we haven't had it for Congress.

The legislature recently introduced passed to the cars.

I don't know enough to see if to make a suggestion whether extending the castle doctrine to cars has caused an increase in violence.

It conceptually, though, makes a lot of difference.

When you're in a car, you're going to know who's legally in the car, who's coming to the car when you're in your home, you know who is illegally in your home.

So there's no going to there's never going to be a mistaken identity when you're in public.

There's a dramatic thing you're not going to know.

You're at a football game.

You are.

You're a rally to protest where people on various sides are there.

It is dramatically different to have no duty to retreat when you're a public.

So we know gun violence is increasing.

And to have this legislation which will increase gun violence, particularly when all the evidence is that states that have passed Stand Your Ground laws in Florida and other states, Texas, when gun violence has increased, homicides have increased.

The American Bar Association has said it.

And an important point is the Stand Your Ground legislation.

It takes away one of the objective considerations, and that is whether an avenue of retreat and it gives more, more weight to the subjective biases of the shooter.

And that everyone of note has said that has a racially discriminatory impact.

So in these troubled times, two, to me, when you have the amount of Amry cases that it is logical to have and the evidence shows that if the shooter is white and the and the the person shot is black, it's much more likely to be found justifiable homicide.

It is terrible in these days to have something that the NAACP, the American Bar Association all agree have a racially discriminatory impact.

I want to ask you about that represented, Kaylor says there is some evidence, though, that people of color use this as a defense more than their white counterparts.

Have you heard of that at all?

And is that something that weighs into this?

Well, unfortunately, blacks are subject to gun violence in greater percentages than whites, but the idea that he's suggesting that because blacks living in the inner cities live with more danger, we ought to we ought to pass something that has a clearly discriminatory impact against more blacks and whites.

Doesn't make any sense to me.

I want to ask you about this weekend's planned armed marches in Columbus and all other state capitals.

This law doesn't take effect for 90 days, but are you concerned at all with that and the tensions that are happening?

And now this law is at least out there and there's some awareness of it that this could come into play?

Absolutely.

A big problem with this law eliminating the duty to retreat is that encourages vigilantism.

And, you know, you don't need to have the law in effect when people read, oh, my goodness, we now have the right to stand your ground.

We now have the right to kill someone, I believe.

And you just look at what happened in the capital and it clearly and, you know, President Trump, whether he legally incited criminal actions, he was encouraging the march.

And this legislation will encourage some people to do crazy things.

So, yes, I'm very concerned.

I years ago, I was at a rally for common sense gun legislation, and Mayor Coleman was mayor at the time, you know, and he spoke and there were people around the audience with AK 47 know that kind of stuff is intimidating.

And if if people wrongfully, it doesn't make any difference whether it's right or wrong, we believe that now I have a right to do things.

Yes, I am very worried about that.

This week, two Democratic state lawmakers say they'll introduce a bill to repeal the so-called Stand Your Ground law, which one refers to as a make my day law.

But with four more Republicans joining the majority in the legislature, that effort may be unlikely to succeed.

And an update to a report from last week's show.

Liz Walters has been chosen as the new chair of the Ohio Democratic Party.

The Summit County Council member lives in Akron and is the first woman to chair the party.

Now, both major parties in Ohio are headed by women.

That's it for this week.

Please check out the Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau website at statenews.org and follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

Please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medda Mutual, Dotcom's Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community, Morad PorterWright Dotcom and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at O H E A dot org.