Ohio Gov. John Kasich – who campaigned for president as a strong supporter of the Second Amendment – knocked Congress for being ‘totally dysfunctional’ and said state and local officials need to enact gun control measures if U.S. lawmakers don’t.
‘If you’re a strong Second Amendment person you need to slow down and take a look at reasonable things that can be done to answer these young people,’ Kasich said Sunday.
Kasich, who ran for the 2016 Republican nomination, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union directly after a group of students from Parkland, Florida – a community rocked Wednesday by yet another school massacre – who demanded gun control.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday that he believed state and local officials should enact gun control measures if the U.S. Congress couldn’t get its act together
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (right) told CNN’s Dana Bash (left) that he was for ‘reasonable things’ to be done on the issue of gun control
CNN’s Dana Bash first asked Kasich, who signed a number of pro-Second Amendment bill while in his current position, how he responded to complaints that his political party has done nothing on guns.
Kasich answered by calling the young people ‘amazing.’
‘They’re absolutely right when they say that politicians have not been responding to any of this,’ the Ohio Republican said. ‘You take a look at the Congress, and I think the Congress is totally dysfunctional. Dana, I have never seen anything like it.’
Kasich, a former U.S. House member himself, blasted lawmakers for not getting an immigration deal passed and for driving up the deficit with President Trump’s tax reform bill, passed in December.
‘They just can’t seem to get anything done, except the fact that they all came together and agreed to take money out of our kids’ piggy banks, because now they just go ahead and blow a hole in the deficit,’ he huffed. ‘So it’s dysfunctional.’
‘Wake up. Wake up,’ he said, scolding U.S. lawmakers.
As for passing new gun laws, Kasich said he had ‘no confidence’ in Congress to act.
Kasich also didn’t seem to have much confidence in President Trump’s leadership ability on the issue.
Bash asked Kasich about a tweet President Trump sent out that suggested the FBI dropped the ball on this particular school shooting because agents were spending too much time on the Russia investigation.
‘I mean, I don’t agree with that. I think it’s an absurd statement, OK? Absurd,’ Kasich said.
He agreed, though, that the country needed ‘leadership out of the executive.’
‘This is a great opportunity for commonsense steps that can be taken just in the area of background checks,’ he said. ‘There should be no ability to do a casual sale without somebody having to find out who they’re selling the gun to and what is involved.’
‘The president should be for that,’ Kasich added.
What the governor moreso advocated was for legislation to be crafted at the local level.
‘Where we have to effect this, I believe, is at the local level and the statehouse, because, because you can have greater access to politicians who serve in the state legislature, in a county commissioner, in a city council,’ the Ohio governor offered. ‘there’s where you need to put the pressure and call these people out.’
In Ohio, Kasich said, he’s formed a committee to look at potential moves, including ‘full background checks,’ how to handle people that have, as Kasich put it, ’emotional problems,’ and a potential bump stock ban.
A bump stock is a device that turns semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones and became part of the gun control vocabulary after the October concert shooting in Las Vegas, in which 58 people were killed and 851 were injured.
‘I was talking to a friend of mine this morning, he’s a big collector. I said, “If all of the sudden, you couldn’t buy an AR-15, what would you lose?”‘ Kasich said, referencing the gun Nikolas Cruz used in the latest massacre and one that has often been used in the mass shooting around the country in recent years.
‘Would you feel as though your Second Amendment rights would be eroded because you couldn’t buy a God-darn AR-15?’ Kasich continued.
‘There are the things that have to be looked at. And action has to happen before – and, look, you’re never going to fix all of this, but commonsense gun laws make sense,’ Kasich added.
Kasich said if his committee doesn’t come up with some solutions, ‘I will put my own stuff out.’