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COLUMBUS — In 2005, Bruce Beatty openly defied Toledo’s ordinance prohibiting guns in city parks, throwing a well-publicized “birthday party” to mark the anniversary of passage of Ohio’s concealed-carry law.

He carried a 45-caliber handgun into West Toledo’s Ottawa Park, and was arrested, tried, and convicted. He was ordered to fork over $129 in fines and court costs that he steadfastly refuses to pay. And despite his protests, Toledo’s law remains on the books.

Three years later, the Ohio Supreme Court will wade into a thorny issue that has the National Rifle Association, Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, and Ohioans for Concealed Carry aligned against cities. The court must decide whether the state can tell local governments whether they can regulate guns on their own property, the latest battle in the wider war over local home-rule authority.

No matter what the court decides, Mr. Beatty’s misdemeanor conviction will stand. The high court refused more than a year ago to hear his appeal of a lower-court ruling upholding Toledo’s law and his conviction.

But Mr. Beatty will watch from a distance Wednesday as the all-Republican court considers a challenge brought by Ohioans for Concealed Carry against a very similar ordinance in the Sandusky County city of Clyde.

“I’m claiming victory,” Mr. Beatty said. “Clyde is going to lose this.”

Incidentally, there will be no guns in the audience when the hot-button case is argued. Courts are one of the places where guns are legally off-limits under Ohio’s concealed-carry law.

The Toledo-based 6th District Court of Appeals struck down Clyde’s ordinance, finding that it conflicts with the state law that legalized the carrying of hidden weapons by law-abiding, licensed Ohioans except for a patchwork of places where guns would be forbidden. Public parks are absent from the off-limits list.

Clyde appealed its loss, and the winners — the state and Ohioans for Concealed Carry — entered into a rare alliance with the city in urging the high court to take up the case.

“By accepting jurisdiction, the court can resolve statewide a question that has been, and continues to be, an important statewide concern,” the attorney general’s office wrote.

The Ohio Municipal League filed a brief with the court to support Clyde that Toledo, Cincinnati, and a number of other cities signed on to.

“The reason that we have all these cases in current years is that some lawmakers are anxious to exclude municipalities from the field of regulation for whatever reason,” said John Gotherman, league general counsel.

Clyde and the other cities argue that Ohio’s concealed-carry law is anything but the uniform, statewide rule that it proclaims to be. As a result, they argue that its application statewide in overturning local gun ordinances would run smack up against cities’ constitutional right to home rule.

Whether it is guns, employee residency requirements, predatory-lending rules, or the legality of red-light cameras, issues related to local home rule have increasingly made their way to or are on their way to the state’s high court.

Last year 22,103 regular concealed-carry licenses were issued, 565 of them in Lucas County, according to the attorney general’s 2007 annual report on the issue. His office, however, does not compile statistics on prosecutions of violations related to the law.

Unlike Toledo, Clyde City Council passed its ordinance prohibiting the carrying of deadly weapons in its parks after Ohio legalized concealed carry for citizens who pass background checks and complete firearm training.

Further complicating matters was the subsequent passage of a law making changes to concealed-carry rules that, for the first time, flatly stated that local governments cannot enact any gun law deemed stricter than state or federal law.

Sandusky County Common Pleas Court, relying on the 6th District’s ruling in the Beatty case, initially had upheld Clyde’s ordinance against the challenge filed by Ohioans for Concealed Carry. But in the wake of passage of the second concealed-carry law, the 6th District abandoned its prior ruling and reversed the Sandusky County ruling and struck down Clyde’s ordinance.

The concealed-carry law allows private-property owners to post their businesses and homes as being off-limits to guns.

The law also expressly prohibits carrying concealed weapons into law enforcement offices like police stations and sheriffs’ offices, prisons, airports, mental institutions, courthouses, government buildings, universities, churches, child day-care centers, bars, restaurants, or any other place that serves alcohol, school property, and any place deemed off-limits under federal law.

Municipal parks are not mentioned.

“The same appellate court has gone both ways, against us in this case and with us in the Toledo case,” Mr. Gotherman said. “The question is, do we have a general law when on one hand the law sets one set of rules for private-property owners and a different set for public owners of parks, a place where there can be a lot of reasons that you wouldn’t want guns?”

Contact Jim Provance at:jprovance@theblade.comor 614-221-0496.

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