Every Florida city should fight extreme state gun law
The Boca Raton City Council wants to consider some reasonable regulations on firearms, like restricting guns in city facilities or parks, a recent resolution states.
But the council hasn’t done so — and for a troubling reason. The members are afraid of running afoul of an extreme state law that has worked like a National Rifle Association hammerlock on local governments across Florida.
That law, passed in 2011, places severe, and unprecedented, penalties on elected officials who enact or enforce rules or regulations regarding firearms and ammunition — which only the Florida Legislature or Constitution are entitled to regulate.
Each local official can be fined up to $5,000 personally, and no public money can be used to reimburse the fined official. The governor can summarily remove that official. And citizens unhappy with a local gun regulation can sue their local government for damages of up to $100,000, plus attorney’s fees.
You might call this unreasonable, a chilling of speech, a usurpation of local authority, an overreach of a governor’s power. You’d be right.
And you’d be agreeing with Boca’s city council. On Tuesday, it voted 4-1 to join at least 10 other cities in a lawsuit that seeks to have the outrageous penalty provisions of Section 790.33, Florida Statutes, declared invalid and unconstitutional.
The Broward County city of Weston filed the suit April 2, on the heels of the mass shooting that left 17 students dead and 17 injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Nine more cities — including Miami Beach, Miramar, Pompano Beach and Miami Gardens — have signed on to the filing. In recent days, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee, Orlando, Gainesville and Surfside have voted to join in, too, plaintiff attorney Jamie A. Cole said Friday.
So far, Boca Raton is the only Palm Beach County town to support the suit. But there isn’t a jurisdiction in this county that shouldn’t be eager to fight this pernicious law.
The lawsuit, which names Gov. Rick Scott and other top state officials as defendants, doesn’t dispute the state’s right to preempt certain subject areas from regulation by local jurisdictions. Tallahassee often claims the exclusive authority for things, from the state lottery to pest-control services.
But only in the case of guns has the state ever threatened local officials and governments with penalties, the lawsuit notes. In every other area, a local law that steps on the state’s toes is simply declared null and void. That there’s an exception for firearms shows how profoundly Florida state government has contorted itself in submission to the pro-gun lobby.
The idea of fining local officials individually for decisions they make in their official capacity violates legal tradition that goes back to pre-Colonial days. You can’t expect many people to serve on the town council if their decisions can lead to personal fines.
Since the Stoneman Douglas High massacre, a majority of Americans want stiffer regulations on guns. But today in Florida, local officials must turn a deaf ear to their citizens who want such action, or risk of fines or removal from office.
These penalties “suppress, in an insidious, Orwellian fashion, the voice of the local electorate through intimidation of local elected officials,” the lawsuit aptly states. They “strike at the core of the American system of democratic representation.”
Making matters worse, the state’s preemption of “the whole field of regulation of firearms and ammunition” is shot through with inconsistencies, the lawsuit asserts. Municipalities can write zoning ordinances pertaining to firearms businesses, for example. Because of the statute’s “conflicting and undefined terms,” municipal attorneys are unable to assure elected officials that any particular act they might want to take on firearms is free of risk.
These muzzles on local government emit the same unconstitutional stink as the Legislature’s notorious “Docs vs. Glocks” ban on physicians asking about firearms in the home. Like that example of zealotry, these shackles on local gun regulations deserve a court’s quick heave-ho.
And the lawsuit against them deserves every Palm Beach County municipality’s support.
But only in the case of guns has the state ever threatened local officials and governments with penalties, the lawsuit notes.