In theory, a Republican governor with a Republican legislature shouldn’t have that hard of a fight getting much of anything accomplished. After all, they’re in the same party, so one would think they’d share similar enough views that it wouldn’t be difficult to find enough common ground to pass some legislation.

In practice, that tends to hold up.

The exception, though, is when a Republican governor is meddling with gun rights, something many in the GOP are vehemently opposed to. That’s what Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is running into.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine may have trouble getting his gun control legislation passed through the legislature despite both chambers being controlled by his party.

After a mass shooter in Dayton, Ohio, killed 10 people, DeWine laid out a plan to curb gun violence, which includes background checks, changes to mental health policy and increased penalties. House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, expressed concern with the plan, however.

“There are several things with the DeWine/Husted plan we have some deep concerns about,” Householder said, according to a report from the Gongwer News Service.

“Whether that be an automobile, a firearm, a knife or a bomb, I think the most important thing, if we’re going to make our communities safer, is to identify these people and get them the type of help they need and separate them from the community for a time to analyze their needs and make our communities safer,” he said. “Any type of instrument can be used so when you sit there and say, ‘I’m going to separate firearms or whatever it might be from the person,’ that doesn’t mean the person can’t go forward and do harm in other ways. We need to keep the human nature of this in perspective.”

In DeWine’s initial discussions, he suggested red-flag laws and mandatory expanded background checks, but he has since shifted his positions slightly.

And while DeWine’s proposals are far from what gun grabbers would ever be satisfied with, even short term, they tend to focus on the tool used, not the tools using them.

In other words, they’re all about the weapon and forgetting that the truly dangerous part is the person on the other end.

That’s something that can’t be ignored. Our problem here is that we have people who have decided to seek fame by slaughtering the innocent in job lots. Would we somehow be better with them running over them in a car or cobbling together homemade explosives? I can’t speak for everyone, but I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Yet that’s what this focus on the guns boils down to, doesn’t it? It suggests that we’re somehow better off if these killers were using other weapons so long as it’s not a firearm.

Honestly, that’s completely bonkers to me, on every level.

That’s also why DeWine is getting pushback from within the party. Republicans often share the view that the problem is the person, not the weapon. It’s too bad that the Democrats and media (but I repeat myself) that pushed DeWine don’t comprehend that fact.