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Utah Governor Gary Herbert supports the talk he’s heard of Mitt Romney going right into Senate leadership if he wins a seat in November.


“I think there’s an opportunity for him to help galvanize, I think there’s the opportunity for him to bring some more unification,” said Herbert, speaking on Friday at POLITICO's State Solutions event that’s available as the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

Herbert said he’s not bothered by Romney running for senate in Utah despite having grown up in Michigan and lived most of his life in Massachusetts, where he was governor, and then New Hampshire—Romney, notes Herbert, has deep ancestral roots in the Beehive State.

Nor is Herbert bothered by Romney’s turnaround in accepting President Donald Trump’s endorsement for his Senate run. In March 2016, Romney tweeted, “If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement.”

“Things have changed,” Herbert said, while acknowledging that the biggest thing to change is that Romney is now a candidate again. “That’s past. That’s history, and rather than regurgitate the differences, let’s find out where we’re similar.”

Herbert said he’s not sure if Romney will run for president again.

Most of the time, the governor’s attention is on issues closer to home, including ramping up what he hopes will be a bid to return the Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City in 2030, using many of the same facilities that he says have been kept in good shape from the 2002 games.

But Herbert’s immediate concern, like many others in government, is trying again to tackle what to do about mass shootings. He’s invested in mental health efforts in Utah through an app and program called SafeUT to boost outreach to at-risk teenagers.

Herbert worries about what messages young boys are getting from American society, and believes violent movies and video games have desensitized Americans to shootings. Pressed to explain why he thinks other countries that have the same movies and games don’t have the same level of shootings, he said, “It’s not just one thing. It’s many things that goes into it. We have a lot more freedom in this country. And when you have that kind of freedom and liberty, you’re probably not as safe.”

Countries like Australia and Germany, which have stricter gun laws, are “not as free as we are here.”

Still, Herbert said, he wasn’t keen on Trump’s proposal to arm teachers, but is open to raising the legal purchase age on assault rifles from 18 to 21—“maybe there’s something that says wisdom comes along, and common sense enhances as you get older,” he said.

He also said he’d like to see restrictions on magazine size for rifles, acknowledging that this puts him in a different place than many in the Republican Party.

“I don’t know that there’s any reason to have anything more than a seven or nine shot magazine,” Herbert said. “Once you get past a typical size when you go out hunting, you’re probably having excess baggage you don’t need.”