Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a measure that bars local jurisdictions from levying fees or requiring Ohioans with firearms and knives to have firearms liability insurance.
Senate Bill 58, the Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act, sponsored by state Sens. Terry Johnson, R-McDermott, and Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, was a reintroduction of Senate Bill 293 from the previous legislature.
According to the sponsors, the measure protects Ohioans’ Second Amendment rights by ensuring they will not have to buy firearm liability insurance or pay a fee for possessing firearms, components, ammunition or knives. It also authorizes the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Section to enforce the measure.
The bill restricts government employees from keeping a list of firearms owners, except those kept during criminal investigations and prosecutions. It also prohibits financial institutions from tracking or regulating the sale of lawful firearms and ammunition, such as requiring a firearms code or declining a transaction involving a firearms retailer based solely on the firearms code assignment.
“Opponents of our Second Amendment rights are an inventive lot, continually seeking ways to get around constitutional protections to prohibit or restrict firearms possession and ownership,” Rob Sexton, the legislative affairs director of the Buckeye Firearms Association, said in prepared testimony to the House Insurance Committee. “But while some opponents of firearms rights seek to outright ban differing types of firearms and equipment, others take a more insidious approach by usurping our rights through government intervention such as attempts to levy taxes on individual rounds of ammunition.”
According to a 2020 finding from the RAND Corporation, roughly 40% of Ohio adults have at least one firearm in their house. Sexton pointed to laws in California, Connecticut, and New York that require anyone who possesses a firearm to obtain special liability insurance.
“They don’t seek to ban firearms outright, but rather raise the cost for owning one, thereby denying self defense rights to those with less financial means and make gun ownership subject to insurance underwriting decisions,” Sexton said.
“Senate Bill 58 takes a proactive approach to this attack and simply spells out that gun owners in Ohio cannot be required to purchase liability insurance as a condition of possessing or purchasing a firearm,” Sexton added. “Senate Bill 58 builds a defense of firearms rights before they are infringed. Seeing the bad examples in other states and even here in Ohio where our big cities openly defy the law to infringe on the rights of people to protect themselves should compel legislators to prevent this type of attack from ever happening here. That is exactly what this bill does.”
The Ohio Municipal League and the Ohio Mayors Alliance are two groups who opposed the measure.
The city of San Jose, Calif., was the first and only local government to mandate firearm liability insurance and an annual gun fee when it passed the requirement in January 2022. In December 2022, New Jersey became the first state to require concealed carry permit holders to maintain at least $300,000 of liability insurance with coverage.
“Ohio has a recent ugly history of imposing various schemes, including fees and fines to disadvantaged people to prevent them from owning firearms. It is wrong,” Jim Irvine of the A1§4 Protection PAC said in prepared testimony to the House Insurance Committee. “The latest craze is requiring insurance (a fee) to own firearms. If the right to vote is ‘too precious, too fundamental’ to be burdened, clearly the right to life, and the ability to defend that life are at least as important. Any financial burden imposed by any government on that right is equally wrong.”
“S.B. 58 corrects and prohibits that wrong and prevents Ohio from running afoul of established law as ruled by the” Supreme Court of the United States, Irvine added. “It is vital legislation for Ohio and deserves unanimous support.”
