Ohio’s “America First” congressional candidate, State Rep. Christina Hagan (R), who is running in the state’s 16th district against the Republican establishment, says she will promote a plan once in Congress to “stop sending our dollars overseas.”
Hagen would instead use the money saved to pay retired and armed American veterans and law enforcement officers to guard and protect U.S. schools.
During an interview with Breitbart News’s Political Editor Matt Boyle and Deputy Political Editor Amanda House on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday, Hagan said her plan to protect American schoolchildren following the Parkland High School shooting did not involve “stripping law-abiding citizens of their rights” to bear arms.
Instead, Hagan said she would push a plan that brings American taxpayer money back to the U.S. to fund armed retired service members and police officers at schools across the country.
Hagan, who was endorsed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), told Breitbart News:
So we’ve actually put forth a policy idea that we would champion when getting into the federal legislature and it has nothing to do with stripping law-abiding citizens of their rights. [Americans’] Second Amendment rights should be absolutely upheld and protected to the very extent that they’re not breaking them. [Emphasis added]
As it looks to the future, we need to have an ‘Americans First’ priority. We need to take dollars that we’re sending all over the world to fund other countries to do incredibly silly things like train cashiers in Wal-Marts and take those dollars back to the United States and invest them in our schools. I mean we can have an ‘American First’ agenda by bringing veterans, by bringing law enforcement and having armed security resource officers in our school systems. [Emphasis added]
We just saw a few weeks ago — and there was very little media attention on it — in Maryland, an armed security resource officer who mitigated an armed shooter right out of the gate. So we just need to have the right people that are positioned to put country above self in with our children and that is the solution. The solution isn’t a massive amount of heightened security, you know making our children feel frightened to go to school, but to protect them and have the right people trained to protect them in that environment.
And it’s not a crazy idea. American dollars should be spent on Americans’ safety and security, and if the national security threat is having an armed gunman in our school rooms, then we need to put our children first and stop sending our dollars overseas. [Emphasis added]
The most recent omnibus spending bill funds a slew of overseas and foreign initiatives using American taxpayer money. For example, the spending bill funds border security in the Middle East for countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Syria.
Meanwhile, the spending bill did not only not fund a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, as Trump has requested, but it specifically blocked the funding of a wall, as Breitbart News reported. Hagan told Breitbart News that she would not only push for a border wall on the southern border, but would also support legislation like the Trump-endorsed RAISE Act that would cut legal immigration levels in half and boost wages for American workers.
“We can’t allow terrorists to come into this country on a Diversity Visa Lottery, it is absolutely ludicrous that we would put our American citizens in harm’s way,” Hagan said.
Hagan’s primary opponent, Anthony Gonzalez, has received the backing of the GOP establishment, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). If elected, Hagan, 29-years-old, would be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Listen to Hagan’s full interview here:
Breitbart News Sunday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.