Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder needs to rally his troops behind Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed plan for strengthening background checks for prospective gun buyers by requiring that all warrants and protection orders be entered into state and national databases.

Householder already has warned that it will be “very difficult” to win approval from the Republican-controlled and gun-loving House for the 17-point gun reform package that DeWine, a fellow Republican, unveiled late last month.

But DeWine’s background check proposal would just bring common sense to what DeWine describes as a “dangerously deficient" system of handling the half million warrants that were open in Ohio as recently as March.

Of those 500,000 warrants, only about 217,000 had been loaded into Ohio’s law enforcement database, and only 18,000 were in the federal background-check system, according to data collected by an administration task force.

Why? In part because existing Ohio law fails to require local law enforcement to report warrants to the databases nor does it require local courts to report civil protection orders.

That makes no sense, given that Ohio law prohibits selling a weapon to anyone who has an outstanding warrant or protection order issued against them.

DeWine proposes to digitize all the warrants and protection orders and train the appropriate people in all of Ohio’s 88 counties and 1,400 local governments to load the documents into the state and federal databases. The state, he says, should pick up the cost of the training.

The proposal infringes on no Second Amendment rights nor does it expand background checks. Having all warrants in the databases also would serve other law-enforcement purposes as well as ensure that people who already are prohibited by law from buying guns can’t do so.

So, that should be something that even the strongest gun-rights advocate could support.

Householder might pick up some persuasive talking points from Eric Delbert, co-owner of L.E.P.D. Firearms in Columbus. Delbert appeared at a news conference with DeWine and told of how problems with the current background-check system resulted in his store selling guns to people who weren’t supposed to have them.

Or the House speaker could simply appeal to common sense. That, we think, should suffice.

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