able to connect them. john: mollie, one of the big questions is where does president trump come down all this and where is the appropriate role? let s hear what john kasich said. we need leadership out of the executive. this is a great opportunity for common sense steps that can be taken. in the area of background checks. of course the president can lead on this and should lead on this. john: the president supports enhanced background checks but really what he is supporting is to enforce the laws already on the books to make sure the federal government and states report to this and ics criminal background check database. they are not doing now. how much leadership are we going to see? people want government action and if they care about government action, there is these. this is the third shooting where there was government failure.
it directed the attorney general and the department of justice to assess every federal agency that has criminal convictions and make sure they re reporting those convictions to the national background check database because a great many agencies and for that matter a great many states have been failing to report convictions to the database. the reason that matters is the database, background checks don t work in the convictions aren t reported. we saw this in my home state where in souther land springs, a deranged madman, he had a felony conviction, domestic violence conviction. under federal law it was illegal for him to buy a gun but the air force under the obama administration failed to report that conviction to the background check database. if cruz grassley had passed the attorney general would have found that convictions and other convictions that hadn t been reported and it would have
buy guns. they were going to take people who were on disability and could not take care of their own finances and deemed the mentally ill and put them into the national background check database. don t tell me that lacking financial document equals violent mental illness. all the republicans moved to repeal it. the nra wanted it repealed. but so did the american association of people with disabilities and the aclu, myriad groups who represent disabled america wanted that repealed because there was no due process in it. it was unfair. it s before jessica said the president doesn t have a plan. no one has a plan because no one knows how to prevent this. that s the honest truth. jessica: we do know little things that count. lawrence: no, we don t know. maybe the fbi and other law
concentrate on that. that s what he said. to be perfectly and specifically clear here, senator chuck grassley was the lead sponsor in the u.s. senate of the bill that passed one year ago today that had one specific purpose, which was to keep people who had adjudicated as seriously mentally ill from having their names added to the fbi database that he s talking about right there. we haven t done a very good job making sure people who have mental reasons to not be getting a gun of getting their name into the fbi files. you have to go out of your way to choose a legislative goal to choose that people with serious, debilitating mental illness can more easily get guns by excluding them from the fbi background check database. that has to be a specific goal. you don t hit that mark in a stand-alone bill that only does that. again, this was not part of any
social security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database had the rule fully taken effect, the obama administration predicted it would have added 75,000 names to that database. we ll never know if those 75 ,000 people would have carried out a shooting. what did we see from speaker ryan? did we see cowardice? more than likely. self interest? probably. so part of what we begin to interrogate what s driving this, what s blocking the conversation and what s driving our ongoing obsession with guns, it has something to do with the complicity of politicians with business models i mentioned earlier, it has something to do with the cowardice of everyday folk. it has to do with culture. this is something we have to think about. there is a toxic masculinity at