It was a headline that could have been plucked from a Carl Hiaasen novel: Florida man irks neighbors with backyard gun range.
But for residents of St. Petersburg’s Lakewood Estates neighborhood, where 21-year-old Joey Carannante planned to shoot at a makeshift target he’d installed in his father’s yard, the threat of guns blasting in the lot next to where their children played was all too real. The “range” had no backstop or anything else to prevent a stray bullet from endangering the lives of those nearby.
Patrick Leary, who lives five doors down from the range, has a 10-year-old son who is friends with a boy who lives next to it. Outraged at the thought of someone firing guns so close to his kids, Leary contacted the press, and the story quickly went viral.
In the wake of public ridicule, arrest threats, and the offer of a free yearlong $500 membership to a public range in Tampa,
Carannante relented.
Although St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman vowed to have Carannante arrested if he fired one shot, it is uncertain whether he could have been prosecuted.
Installing a gun range on your property is perfectly legal under Florida law, and discharging a gun in public is only illegal when the gun is fired over public right-of-way or in a “reckless and negligent” manner, whatever that means.
Approved by state lawmakers in 1987, Florida Statute 790.15 is one of several laws on the state’s books that have won Florida the nickname The Gunshine State. Up until recent years, municipalities assumed that they could limit where gun ranges could be installed. That changed in 2011, when lawmakers passed a bill that asserted the state’s near-absolute control over gun policies. A local official who tries to regulate guns in violation of state policy can be fined $5,000 and even removed from office.
Florida may not have the loosest gun laws in the nation (Arizona enjoys that distinction, according to a report by the Brady Campaign
Against Gun Violence). But the state is just as lax as Georgia, South Carolina and Lousiana in its policies on background checks, gun availability and firearms in public places. It was also the first state to pass a law making it illegal for doctors to ask their patients if they own guns (Privacy of Firearm Owners Act, 2011). And the state made international headlines with its controversial Stand Your Ground law, signed into law in 2005 by then-Governor Jeb Bush, which allows individuals to use deadly force if they feel threatened.
Writer Tom Diaz, in his book The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry are Killing Americans and What it Will Take to Stop It, says the state “has been used as a Petri dish by the gun-mad scientists” of the gun lobby.
And there’s more brewing in next month’s legislative session.
“I think it’s kind of like Florida Gone Wild, the Wild West, whatever you want to call it,” said State Rep. Mark Pafford, a Palm Beach County Democrat and current House Minority Leader.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano there are several functioning homemade gun ranges in the county, mostly in north county cities like Clearwater and Palm Harbor.
“My first reaction to one of these cases was, ‘Heck no, that can’t be right. That has to be unlawful,’” Gualtieri told Romano. “After researching it, we realized, ‘Sheesh, it really is legal.’”
Leary said he’s outraged that state law doesn’t expressly outlaw potentially dangerous home gun ranges, especially in urban areas.
“This was so patently absurd to me I could not believe it was legal,” he said. “This could be in your back yard. Literally your back yard.”
Kriseman, a lawyer who was in the State House at the time these bills were passed, said he thinks he’d be legally empowered to call for Carranante’s arrest if he were to fire a gun in Lakewood Estates, because doing so within several yards of a treehouse where children play would obviously be “reckless and negligent.”
“I remember the intent [of the bill], at least as it was expressed and as it was in the staff analysis,” Kriseman said. “And after reading, I was comfortable that I had a defensible position that I could take in directing my police chief that if [Carannante] were to have discharged his weapon, that he should be arrested, if we observed him doing it … that he wasn’t protected under the other part of the statute.”
He’d still like to see a law that clearly bars residential gun ranges in urban areas.
State Rep. Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat, filed a bill last week that would initiate such a ban, but it’s unlikely it will get any traction, given the GOP’s reluctance to pass laws limiting gun use.
Despite their initial outrage over Carannante’s contraption, Republicans and the gun lobby don’t appear supportive of anything that would clarify what’s currently on the books. Marion Hammer, executive director of Unified Sportsmen of Florida, an NRA affiliate, and State Senator Jeff Brandes have both said the wording that’s there now is sufficient.
“He believes current law with the standard of recklessness and negligence is pretty clear,” Chris Spencer, a spokesman for the senator told CL. “As a veteran who has been around firearms extensively, he would characterize the establishment of a makeshift, clandestine backyard shooting range in an urbanized area like St. Petersburg as the very definition of reckless and negligent,” Spencer later added in an email.
In past cases when things have turned deadly, or potentially so, law enforcement has been reluctant to prosecute shooters who are endangering their neighbors.
If you kill someone with a car as a result of reckless driving, you’ll probably get prosecuted. But if you shoot a gun recklessly while standing in your back yard in Florida and someone dies, prosecution is not a given.
Take what happened to 69-year-old rural Deltona resident Bruce Fleming on Christmas Day in 2013. He was killed by a stray bullet fired at a nearby home firing range. In July of 2014, a grand jury declined to indict Julio Lemus, who had been aiming for a bird but instead hit Fleming.
And last month in Lithia, also a rural area, Dawn Bryan’s house was hit with ten AK-47 bullets fired by a neighbor, Hillsborough County firefighter Scott Radford, and his friend, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputy Paul Adee. One bullet broke a window above a crib where one of Bryan’s children slept, though the child wasn’t in the crib at the time.
Despite her calls for an investigation, Bryan told The Tampa Tribune, none has taken place.
Why the difference in consequences between death by reckless driving vs. by reckless backyard shooting?
“The NRA isn’t trolling traffic court,” said Leary, a veteran and a gun owner.
Gun control advocates cite the influence of the National Rifle Association as the major culprit for the profusion of potentially harmful gun laws.
“It seems each year, whether it’s been requested or not — the gun lobby is very powerful — and they come up with ideas or end up supporting ideas that really limit a lot of the regulations that have to do with guns and firearms,” Pafford said, adding that he expects legislation relating to guns to come up every year, but never knows what it will be.
And even though many who advocate loosening gun laws use safety as a key argument, the numbers tell a different story.
“While the Sunshine State’s violent crime has decreased, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, gun-related fatalities increased 35 percent from 1999 to 2009, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” Bloomberg political writer Michael C. Bender wrote in 2012. “That’s double the rate of population growth during that time and seven times greater than the
national average.”
Kriseman said he recalls intimidation from the gun lobby when such bills were being debated in Tallahassee.
“When these bills would come up to be heard on the floor of the House, Marion Hammer would sit in the front row of the gallery, where everybody could see her, and would look down on everybody and watch them as they voted,” he said. “It’s a gun culture. It’s all about the NRA and the power of the NRA.”
There are two key reasons state lawmakers are so amenable to loosening Florida’s restrictions on guns.
Money, obviously, is one factor. The NRA Political Victory Fund gave $2.6 million to candidates, campaigns and committees at the state level between 2002 and 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
“You would be told that they’d potentially run someone against you, that they’d fund your opponent,” Kriseman said. “I know folks who have had considerable sums of money thrown in their direction or against them” by the NRA, depending on how they voted.
And, Pafford points out, Florida has a deep cultural divide — a clash between rural and urban areas.
“A lot of these bills aren’t sponsored from urban-dense areas,” Pafford said. “These bills are sponsored by people who, they may still have a headline in the sports section that some kid hit an eight-point buck. The last time [someone shot a buck] in Miami was 75-100 years ago. The only time we read about guns there, unfortunately, are these types of tragedies.”
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.