How Parkland students could get assault weapons banned
The people of our state got a tawdry but timely lesson in applied civics from state leaders this week. If Florida is to be protected from assault weapons, we will have to do it ourselves.
Children who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre got the message Tuesday as they watched from the House of Representatives gallery. Its members voted 71 to 36 against taking up a ban on weapons of war like the one used to kill 14 of their peers and three teachers. All the yeas were Democrats. All the nays were Republicans.
The Associated Press photographer focused on the gallery at that moment. His lens found a 16-year-old girl weeping as a classmate tried to comfort her. She wept for us all. The Stoneman Douglas students and thousands of sympathizers got the same message Wednesday when legislators skittered out the Capitol’s back doors to avoid them.
It’s the same message the Florida League of Women Voters and other citizens heard Tuesday when they asked the Constitution Revision Commission, at a public hearing in Melbourne, to ban assault weapons.
Chairman Carlos Beruff said they could talk about it if they insisted, but it wouldn’t matter. “That is not one of the 37 proposals before us,” he said.
That wasn’t quite true. One of the 37 proposed amendments before the commission tweaks the right to bear arms. It could be amended easily to ban assault weapons.
The likelihood is faint, though, considering that Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature’s leaders, the same people who’ve done nothing to prevent mass shootings in our state, appointed most of the commission’s members.
But those “leaders” don’t necessarily have the last word.
The same 1968 Constitution that created the revision commission, which is convened every 20 years, also allows citizens to petition to put an amendment on the ballot. It’s called the initiative. We, the people, have used the citizen’s initiative process to ratify some two dozen amendments, including term limits in 1992 and the “Fair District” proposals in 2010 that skewered the Legislature’s gerrymandering schemes.
In 1990, the likely success of a petition drive to require a seven-day cooling-off period on handgun sales spooked the Legislature into putting a three-day restriction on the ballot, where it passed with 84 percent of the vote. It does not apply to rifles.
The Constitution Revision Commission of 1998 proposed a local option amendment allowing counties to extend the cooling-off period to five days, require a background check and apply it to all firearms sales, rifles as well as handguns. That passed with 72 percent of the vote, but only five counties, including Broward and Palm Beach, have taken advantage of it. (That’s why it’s easier to get an assault rifle than a handgun most everywhere else in Florida. Where counties haven’t exercised their option, you have to wait three days for a handgun, but not a rifle.)
On Friday, the governor and legislative leaders released a number of proposals in response to the Parkland shooting. They include putting more armed officers in schools, prohibiting anyone under age 21 from purchasing firearms and increasing money for mental health services in schools. But they failed to address the weapon of choice used to commit mass shootings, the AR-15.
No doubt, better mental health care is an overdue and welcome development, although it begs the question of why any citizen, sane or insane, needs a weapon devised for maximum lethality in warfare.
Raising the age to buy firearms is appropriate too, although it won’t do all that much. The Valentine’s Day killer was 19, but in 32 American mass shootings, the median age is 28. Only nine of the 36 murderers in those cases were under 21. One of those, the 20-year-old who killed 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, got his weapons from his mother, who became his first victim.
If President Trump or the Legislature ever had a dumber idea than arming teachers, we can’t recall one. It’s a prescription for more dead teachers and more dead students. Teachers are teachers, not SWAT team cops.
The failure to address the central problem — banning military-style weapons that inflict orange-sized wounds and pulverize organs — is the sort of crisis for which the voter initiative was made: a serious threat to our safety when the government is unable or unwilling to act.
In this instance, our government belongs to a powerful special interest: the National Rifle Association, the manufacturers who finance it and the minority of Floridians who cast their votes solely on this one issue.
Despite what some politicians pretend, it is possible to write an assault weapons ban that manufacturers could not easily overcome. House Bill 219, the one Republicans didn’t want to hear this week, doesn’t just itemize them by make and model. It defines the characteristics that make them so lethal.
It’s difficult and costly to acquire enough valid signatures — presently 766,200 — to place an initiative on the ballot. The bulk of that expense is in gathering signatures in a short time period. But Florida has a new and highly motivated army of potential volunteers.
Dozens were in the House gallery Tuesday. Thousands were outside the Florida Capitol on Wednesday and at CNN’ s town hall in Plantation that night. And students will be marching all over the nation March 14. They are an army, ready and willing, to circulate the petitions. They need a respected champion to help.
It’s probably too late to get a proposed amendment on this year’s ballot. But it’s not too late to start for 2020, when the presidential election will draw a larger turnout than usual.
The politicians who won’t hear them belong to the past. Our students are our future. Let them create a movement to change our state — and tomorrow, our country.