John Kasich wanted to be president of the United States. While he was never a front-runner, most Republicans seemed to figure that if he landed in the White House, it wouldn’t be a complete disaster. The Ohio Governor was probably not the worst choice possible, right?

Well, his antics since then have been more than enough to convince me that he would have been a trainwreck as president.

After all, his continued push for gun control despite his own party’s opposition to it.

Gov. John Kasich has grown increasingly frustrated as he’s watched shootings in Las Vegas and Florida — and closer to home in Cincinnati and his city of Westerville — fail to move state lawmakers around the country to tighten state gun laws.

That includes in Ohio, where his fellow Republicans in Columbus have sidelined a package of what Kasich dubbed “sensible (gun law) changes that should keep people safer” that the governor advanced this spring.

…

Kasich said more public pressure must be brought to bear to get lawmakers to act.

“It’s just hard to do this, particularly when it leaves the public consciousness soon after it happens,” Kasich said in an interview with the AP.

Kasich said public concern appeared to wane after two Westerville police officers were fatally shot in February and it will surely happen again with the gun attack that left three people dead and two others injured Sept. 6 in Cincinnati.

He protested legislative inaction on the Ohio bill by declining to sign the next gun measure that crossed his desk.

In other words, as a Republican, he’s one heck of a Democrat.

Look, gun laws don’t make people safer, and there are no “sensible” gun laws. There are just laws that make life difficult for the law-abiding citizen and do jack squat to the criminals who are the real problem. This is true in every single case, even with less controversial laws like the National Firearms Act that regulates machine guns. Tell me, has organized crime had trouble getting fully-automatic weapons? Of course not.

But for you and me? Well, that’s a whole different story.

Kasich is getting opposition from his the party because his foundational philosophy on this is flawed. Instead, he’s sounding an awful lot like Dianne Feinstein or Michael Bloomberg. If he can’t understand why he’s getting this pushback, there’s something very, very wrong with him.

All I can say is that I’m glad he’s not in the White House. Can you imagine what a President Kasich would do to gun rights if given half a chance? While he wouldn’t be able to do things unilaterally, he might provide cover for weak-willed Republicans in Congress to side with the Democrats and push through any manner of nonsense.

Luckily, he doesn’t have that kind of power.

But he does have the power to do plenty to our brothers and sisters in Ohio, and for that, he needs to be opposed. The fact that he’s also shown that he’s willing to follow President Obama’s lead on using executive orders to push through things the legislature won’t do makes it that much more important that people stand up.