Man challenges ban on guns

FRANKLIN -- A gun enthusiast is challenging a 21-year-old county ordinance, claiming that it violates his constitutional right to bear arms.\nThe ordinance prohibits anyone except a police officer from carrying a loaded gun within 500 feet of a plated subdivision in unincorporated Johnson County.\nJohn Lowe claims the ordinance is too broad and could prohibit a resident near a subdivision from displaying an assembled gun in a case hanging on the wall of his home.\n"Do I really think they'll enforce it that way? No," Lowe told The Daily Journal for a story Wednesday. "But they could. They could enforce it that way."\nA lack of clear intent of the central Indiana county's ordinance is one of the reasons Lowe filed a complaint this month asking a judge to rule that the ordinance is unconstitutional.\nLowe's suit claims that the ordinance violates his right to liberty and property provided in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and his right to bear arms for self-defense provided in the preamble to the Indiana Constitution.\nThe suit also cites a state law passed in 1994 that says local governments "may not regulate in any manner the ownership, possession, sale, transfer or transportation of firearms."\nCounty attorney Tom Jones said he had not yet had much time to review Lowe's suit. He planned to search for legal precedent stating that the reasonable regulation of firearms is constitutional, he said.\n"Either I'll find a law or I won't," Jones said. "If I do, we'll win it. If I don't, we won't."\nLowe wasn't aware of the local ordinance until Johnson County sheriff's deputies arrived at his home west of Greenwood in May 2001 after a neighbor complained that he was shooting in his back yard.