At about 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 4, 2019, a man in body armor opened fire on Fifth Street in Dayton's Oregon District. Police killed him in less than thirty seconds. In those thirty seconds he murdered nine people and injured at least 27.
Mike Turner's daughter Jessica was there. She and a friend had just crossed Fifth Street and were about to walk into a restaurant when the shooting started. She ran into Tumbleweed Connection, across from Ned Peppers Bar, hit the floor with everyone else, and got out the back door.
"She called me as she was fleeing and said they didn't know how many shooters there were, whether or not the area was safe," Turner told WHIO. "So they were going to keep going. And so it was almost an hour before we got real information."
Two days later, Turner did something almost no House Republican had done after a mass shooting.
August 6, 2019: the promise
He put out a press release. Its title was: "TURNER Supports Restricting Military Style Weapon Sales, Magazine Limits, & Red Flag Legislation."
Here is what he wrote, in full:
"I strongly support the Second Amendment, but we must prevent mentally unstable people from terrorizing our communities with military style weapons. I will support legislation that prevents the sale of military style weapons to civilians, a magazine limit, and red flag legislation. The carnage these military style weapons are able to produce when available to the wrong people is intolerable.
We must pass red flag legislation to quickly identify people who are dangerous and remove their ability to harm others. Too often after mass shootings, we hear there were early warning signs that were ignored."
He explained why the magazine limit mattered, using the shooting in his own district as the example:
"This weekend, a shooter wearing body armor opened fire in downtown Dayton with a weapon he had modified to be able to hold 100 rounds of ammunition."
And he closed:
"This tragedy must become a catalyst for a broader national conversation about what we can do to stop these mass shootings."
Three specific commitments, in his own words, on his own letterhead: military-style weapon sales, a magazine limit, red flag legislation.
It was national news. Here was a Republican congressman whose child had run for her life, saying out loud that the guns were the problem.
That press release is no longer on his House website — the page returns "Page Not Found." It survives in the Internet Archive.
June 8, 2022: the magazine limit
Three years later the House took up the Protecting Our Kids Act. Under the rule for the bill, members voted separately on whether to keep each of its titles.
Title VI was called "Keep Americans Safe." It is the magazine limit — it defined a "large capacity ammunition feeding device" as anything holding more than 10 rounds, and banned it.
This was the exact thing Turner had promised. It was aimed at the exact problem he had described: a weapon modified to hold 100 rounds.
Turner voted to strike it out of the bill. The title survived 220 to 207, with Turner in the 207.
He also voted to strike Title IV, the safe-storage requirement, and then voted against the whole bill on final passage, which passed 223 to 204.
June 9, 2022: the red flag law
The next day the House voted on H.R. 2377, the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act. That is a red flag law: it lets a court temporarily take firearms from someone shown to be a danger to themselves or others.
Turner in 2019: "We must pass red flag legislation to quickly identify people who are dangerous and remove their ability to harm others."
Turner in 2022: no. The bill passed 224 to 202 without him.
July 29, 2022: the military-style weapons ban
Seven weeks after that, the House voted on H.R. 1808, the Assault Weapons Ban — legislation preventing the sale of military-style weapons to civilians, which is the first thing on Turner's 2019 list, phrased almost identically.
Turner voted no. It passed anyway, 217 to 213, by four votes.
He had also, the year before, voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act.
Being fair about the one he did vote for
Turner is not a total no. On June 24, 2022, he was one of 14 House Republicans who voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the modest package that actually became law after Uvalde. It passed 234 to 193.
That vote matters, and it's worth saying so. It also makes the rest of the record harder to explain, not easier.
The Safer Communities Act does not ban military-style weapons. It does not limit magazine size. It funds state red flag programs but does not create a federal one. In other words, Turner voted for the bill that contained none of the three things he promised, and voted against every bill that contained any of them.
He didn't lose a close call on principle. He supported the version that asked nothing of the gun industry and opposed the versions that did.
What the record actually shows
Put it side by side.
| What Turner promised, August 6, 2019 | What Turner did |
|---|---|
| "legislation that prevents the sale of military style weapons to civilians" | Voted no on the Assault Weapons Ban, July 29, 2022 |
| "a magazine limit" | Voted to strip the magazine limit out of a bill, June 8, 2022 |
| "red flag legislation" | Voted no on the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act, June 9, 2022 |
This is a pattern, not a Turner invention. Brian Mast wrote a New York Times op-ed after Parkland asking for an immediate pause on AR-15 sales, then voted against the assault weapons ban and scrubbed the position from his campaign site. The promise comes in the week the country is watching. The vote comes three years later, when it isn't.
Nine names
The picture at the top of this post is from the vigil in the Oregon District: nine floral hearts, each with a name card. The nine were Megan Betts, Monica Brickhouse, Nicholas Cumer, Derrick Fudge, Thomas McNichols, Lois Oglesby, Saeed Saleh, Logan Turner and Beatrice Warren-Curtis.
Turner said their deaths "must become a catalyst." He was right. He just wasn't willing to be the catalyst himself when the roll was called, and the roll was called four times.
There is no forum in which a Dayton voter can ask him about this. Turner has never held a public town hall and has not said whether he'll debate his opponent before November 3.
Sources
Turner's August 6, 2019 statement is preserved at the Internet Archive: TURNER Supports Restricting Military Style Weapon Sales, Magazine Limits, & Red Flag Legislation. His daughter's account was reported by WHIO. Every vote above links to the official roll call at the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House. Photo: vigil for the 2019 Dayton shooting victims, via Wikimedia Commons.
