Update: the NRA is so mad over this bill that they're already suing the State of Florida, which now has to spend a ton of money defending the bill in court.
Florida Governor Rick Scott signed the the hotly debated gun bill into law Friday.
It was the issue that took up much of the legislative session following the shooting in Parkland that left 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Feb. 14.
Among the bipartisan bill's highlights: It raises the minimum age for buying any gun from 18 to 21, creates a three-day waiting period for prospective gun buyers and creates a program that would arm certain school personnel. It also bans bump stocks, which were a factor in the Las Vegas shooting's death toll.
Scott had opposed the portion arming "personnel," which is includes teachers who, say, coach a sport or lead any other extracurricular activities.
The Florida legislature had passed the bill earlier in the week. The State Senate passed it on a narrow 20-18 vote and the Florida House passed it 67-50.
The bill, while it had bipartisan support, had mixed reviews. Nobody was all that in love with it.
Some House Republicans disliked the bill's gun purchase restrictions enough to vote against it. Democrats, meanwhile, said it doesn't go far enough in preventing weapons capable of mass murder from getting into the hands of deranged individuals.
The National Rifle Association, the powerful group that has heavily influenced Florida's gun laws (or lack thereof), panned Scott's signing of the bill, which they said takes guns out of the hands of otherwise lawful people.
“This bill punishes law-abiding gun owners for the criminal acts of a deranged individual,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action. “Securing our schools and protecting the constitutional rights of Americans are not mutually exclusive. Instead of looking to the root cause of this premeditated violence, the gun control provisions in this law wrongly blame millions of Floridians who safely and responsibly exercise their right to self-defense.”
Nikolaus Cruz, the shooter in Parkland, was 20, hence the bill's age restriction.
Cox said policymakers should "look for solutions that keep guns out of the hands of those who are a danger to themselves or others, while protecting the rights of law-abiding Americans."
The response of Democrats, of course, was the inverse of that. They cited the passionate activism of students from Parkland and across the country, who rallied for a ban on assault-style guns like the one Cruz used as well as universal background checks.
“They marched, protested, and started a movement — but this isn’t the legislation the students of Parkland so bravely fought for. It doesn’t include key components like expanding universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and it doesn’t even accomplish what Scott himself said he would do," Florida Democratic Party chair Terrie Rizzo in a written statement.
That last part, of course, was in reference to Scott's opposition to arming teachers.
The party also sought to call out Rick Scott and other Republicans, whom they said did nothing in the 20 months between the shooting massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando and the one in Parkland.
"It was 612 days between Pulse and Parkland, and Rick Scott and Tallahassee Republicans did nothing — and this legislation falls short of correcting that negligence," Rizzo's statement continued. "Instead of setting aside his self-serving politics and taking serious action to make Floridians safer from gun violence, Scott has demonstrated once again why Floridians don’t trust him to look out for anyone but himself.”
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2018.
