While mousing through one of my virtual history folders the other day I knocked the pixel dust off of an old article from Ohio headlined, "Belmont County Wants No Guns On Its Properties." Why did I save this snippet? I wondered. A quick review served as a memory prompter: while Ohioans had recently won back the right to concealed carry from their state nannycrats, they were simultaneously losing any place to do the actual carrying. A feature, I foresaw, that lent itself to a little libertarian parsing.

(Parsing used to be strictly the province of English majors, in which a grammarian could peruse a selected text and declare, "This is a verb, this is a noun, and this is a subjunctive intransitive modal augmented with an adverbial phrase and lexically bifurcated by a dangling metaphor in the tertiary syntax." Today, parsing is a popular political pastime in which a perfectly objective journalistic pundit, or some other practitioner of spin, can review a speech and declare, "This is a bucket of bull, this is proof of a vast right wing conspiracy, and this all depends on what the meaning of is is.")

The article in question appeared in The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register. (The last time I checked my US atlas, Wheeling was situated in West Virginia, not Ohio. It is an old atlas, however, and therefore may not account for any effects of continental drift that may have occurred recently.)

Okay, that was fun but mostly irrelevant padding. Here's the story, accompanied by that little libertarian parsing I promised:

The second the Ohio Gov signs the concealed carry law (which should now read "signed" as I'm admittedly quoting an old article from March 31) Belmont County commissioners were ready to start slapping/have already slapped "no guns allowed" signs on every speck of county property. So how, you ask/asked, can local yokelcrats thumb their snouts at a statewide law? According to The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register (of West Virginia, not Ohio), the law supposedly says they can. Quoting Belmont County Commissioner Mark Thomas thusly: "As much as the new legislation allows a person to carry concealed weapons, it also gives employers the authority to ban weapons from their establishment." And furthermore, further quoting said article: "county officials have concern not just for the safety of elected officials, but also for their employees."

And that's where the parsing problem appears.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: pars verb 2 : to examine in a minute way : analyze critically <parses appellate court opinions>

Except in this case we need to parse Belmont County Commissionercrats' opinions: exactly how does the noun phrase "public servant" get parsed into the professional appellative "employer?" County commissioners are not "employers," the civil subservients who work for them are not their "employees," and the buildings they work in are not "their establishment." Commissioners and civil servantcrats are all employees of the citizens of Belmont County, and the buildings they work in are owned by those same Belmontians.

No libertarian, even the inveterate gun nut type, would preclude an employer, or any private person, from banning guns from their personal property. Or banning porn or water balloons or chewing gum or little yapping Pekinese dogs for that matter. But elected officialcrats are neither employers nor owners of public property and therefore have no right to turn county assets into non-defense zones.

But that's exactly what they're doing. Thomas wants to ban guns from the courthouse, his "place of business." The fair board wants the ban extended to the county fairgrounds, which is apparently their "workplace." What next, the county library, Parks and Recreation, sewer and waterworks, the dog pound, the cemetery?

Pretending to be employers in order to prohibit concealed carry in public places completely contradicts the codification of concealed carry in public places. Black is white, up is down, verbs are nouns and pigs take wing in Belmont County. Or do county decrees cancel state statutes in Ohio? Plus, Countycrats never explain why they think county employees need protection from protecting themselves. Are their lives less important than private people's lives?

Unfortunately, it's not just Belmont County. This gun phobia policy was developed by "the staff and board of trustees of the County Commissioners Association of Ohio." Seems every county in the state will be trying to parse themselves into "employers."

Let's hope there are enough freedom-friendly Buckeyes up north to buck/will buck/are bucking/have successfully bucked this nutty notion of who's the employer and who's the servant.

Parse that, Firearm phobics!