Preemption is a useful tool when it comes to gun laws. It keeps the gun laws uniform throughout a state. This is handy for people who travel as all they need to do is be aware of the gun laws in a state, rather than also needing to check each and every city they plan to travel to. After all, do you know what’s bad for tourism? Felony convictions.

Many states have preemption and anti-gunners hate it. They know they can push anti-gun cities to adopt draconian gun control laws that won’t work, thus allowing them to try and use that to leverage states into more gun control laws that won’t work and so on.

Which is probably why there’s now a bill in Ohio seeking to end the state’s preemption law.

Ohio lawmakers passed a law in 2006 that prevented local governments from passing any gun laws that are more restrictive than those enacted at the state level, and when cities challenged it, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the law. Now, there’s a move afoot to change it.

Democratic Sen. Cecil Thomas is sponsoring a bill to allow cities to, once again, implement gun reforms. He said the one size fits all approach now in place isn’t working.

“What may be of interest in the rural areas could be detrimental in an urban core.”

Except, it’s not. Urban centers have high crime rates for a variety of reasons. It’s not because of a lack of gun control laws and creating a confusing patchwork of local ordinances won’t actually improve much of anything.

Further, there is the fact that gun control is only really universal in one thing: Failure.

Gun control laws don’t do anything they’re supposed to do. They don’t stop criminals from getting guns and they never have. What they do, though, is prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining the best methods for self-defense possible. The cities aren’t capable of determining what needs warrant what weapons and they don’t even bother. They just ban things like AR-15s because they’re scary looking, yet similar weapons have been needed to save lives.

Meanwhile, regardless of what laws get passed, the criminals will still get guns and open fire whenever they feel like it. They’ll step outside of the law and keep getting guns. They’ll keep getting them either on the black market or by utilizing straw buyers who will simply leave the cities with strict laws and purchase them in outlying counties.

If there’s a saving grace, it’s that this bill, S.B. 202, only has a handful of co-sponsors. That’s often an indicator of just how much support a bill has, and as of this writing, it has just five. Added to the two original sponsors, that’s not a lot of support.

Of course, that could change. It would be wise for Ohio gun rights activists to reach out to their state legislators and remind them that Ohio doesn’t need this kind of thing and to vote against it. Turn up the heat so that this bill dies an ignoble death, as all gun control legislation should.