COLUMBUS, Ohio—On the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting in Dayton that took nine lives, Gov. Mike DeWine announced plans for a system to ensure warrants are reported to national databases and again beseeched state lawmakers to pass his languishing package of gun-law reforms.
“Sadly, Ohio’s laws are exactly where they were a year ago. Ohioans are saying to the state legislature, ‘Do something,’” said DeWine, a Greene County Republican, during a televised briefing Tuesday. “We must not let the deaths of these nine people be forgotten.”
The governor said in the next month, his office will set up an “e-warrant” system in Montgomery County and nine other counties to make entry of warrants and protection orders into national databases “as easy as possible.”
DeWine has previously called for measures to require the entry of such information into national databases, which are used to conduct background checks for gun buyers.
While the governor’s 10-county “e-warrant” program will have no penalties for officials who don’t report court orders into the databases, he urged state lawmakers to pass legislation mandating such action.
Right now, entering a warrant into a national database is a slow, two-step paper process, said Lt. Gov. Jon Husted. In addition, Husted said the current system has “many holes” that the e-warrant system would fix.
The system won’t be active for another 6-7 months, Husted said. The lieutenant governor said such a system is “not a controversial issue” and is backed by gun-rights proponents.
Already, DeWine said, work done by his administration’s warrant task force has resulted in a 903% jump in the number of arrest warrants entered into the national warrant database since March 2019.
DeWine also renewed his call for state lawmakers to pass his “STRONG Ohio” plan, a series of gun-policy changes he unveiled in the wake of the Aug. 4, 2019 mass shooting, in which a gunman killed nine people outside a popular Dayton bar before being fatally shot by police.
The governor's plan (which initially sought universal background checks but was later scaled back) would:
- Create a voluntary background-check process for gun sales between private sellers
- Expand the state’s existing “pink-slip” law to allow authorities to send people with drug or alcohol problems to a psychiatric hospital, where they cannot legally have access to guns.
- Increase Ohio’s penalty for illegally selling a firearm from a fourth-degree felony to a third-degree felony.
DeWine said last year that passing these measures would be his top priority for 2020.
However, the Republican-dominated Ohio General Assembly, which has loosened many gun-control provisions in recent years, has shown lukewarm interest at best in the governor’s plan. And with the rise of the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, DeWine moved his gun-policy proposals to the back burner.
As DeWine spoke during a post-shooting vigil in Dayton, a crowd of people chanted “Do something” at the governor – words that the governor said Tuesday continue to move him.
“We simply cannot continue to let this bill languish while people continue to die,” he said. “Doing nothing is simply not an option.”