Testimony

HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE

WRITTEN INTERESTED PARTY TESTIMONY ON HOUSE BILL 5 | MAY 14, 2025

Chair Thomas, Vice Chair Mathews, Ranking Member Isaacsohn, and members of the House Judiciary Committee, thank you for the opportunity to provide written interested party testimony on House Bill 5.

As a bipartisan coalition of mayors in Ohio’s largest cities and suburbs, public safety is our highest priority. Public safety expenses make up the lion’s share of our cities’ budget expenditures, and we invest significantly in our public safety forces, equipment, and infrastructure.

As part of our investments in public safety, our cities and local police departments are committed to doing everything we can to address gun violence. As we have seen through various violence prevention strategies in our cities, it is generally a small number of individuals that perpetrate a majority of the gun crimes in our communities. To address these concerns and to help reduce gun violence in our cities, we must have the tools to help keep repeat violent offenders off the streets. We welcome this effort to give our cities more tools to prevent and reduce violent crime.

We appreciate the work of Reps. Bernie Willis and Josh Williams in sponsoring HB 5 and we support the following provisions of this bill:

• Enhancing the weapons under disability felony level for people convicted of violent offenses.

• Increasing penalties for repeat violent offenders and offenders whose charges include firearms specifications.

We believe that these provisions will help us get and keep repeat violent offenders and gun crime offenders off our streets. We remain concerned about any language in the bill that would put guns back into the hands of drug traffickers, weapons traffickers, and other individuals we are struggling to apprehend and put out of business in our cities. We will continue to work with the committee and bill sponsors to ensure that HB 5 is narrowly tailored to make sure Ohio’s weapons under disability law functions effectively and to ensure that firearms access is not inadvertently restored to criminals and individuals we all agree should not have access to deadly weapons.

We will continue to work together with our partners across party lines and at all levels of government to ensure public safety and to keep illegal guns and violent criminals off our streets. Thank you for your time and commitment to Ohioans’ safety.