NRA’s Hammer: right to shoot guns trumps right to clean water

As the Tampa Bay Times  reported Tuesday, passionate gun rights advocate Marion Hammer has called for the disbanding of the Southwest Florida Water Management District (a.k.a. SWFWMD, or Swiftmud) over its dispute with a gun range that’s adjacent to Sawgrass Lake, a Pinellas Park preserve the state agency manages.

The decades-old battle stems from the buildup of lead from bullets and shotgun pellets since The Skyway Trap and Skeet Club opened some seven decades ago.

In the 1990s, according to Swiftmud's website , the agency found elevated levels of lead and arsenic in Sawgrass Lake, something it easily correlate with the park’s proximity to the range.

In addition to being an ecologically sensitive area, serene natural environment and environmental education center, Sawgrass Lake Park is home to waters that flow into Tampa Bay.

Swiftmud sued the range, which resulted in a settlement in which the range owners were asked to construct a barrier to stop the spent ammunition from enter in the park and cleanup some of the pollution that was already within the management area.

The agency is taking care of materials found within the bounds of the park, meanwhile.

But Hammer, a well-known former head of the National Rifle Association and powerful NRA lobbyist familiar among legislators for her Death Stare, says the agency’s attempt to protect local waterways is nothing more than a power hungry government agency’s attempt to restrict Joe Six-Pack’s Second Amendment rights, calling Swiftmud’s efforts to reign in toxic seepage into local waterways “back door gun control.”

Never mind that Pinellas County Schools literally stopped taking kids there on field trips because of the amount of pollution (some 496,000 pounds of lead, reported WTSP) . After all, part of the children’s field trip involved taking water samples, which obviously involves using one’s hands.

She wants Governor Rick Scott and the state legislature to further weaken environmental regulations in the state by disbanding the one agency that monitors and oversees key water sources for some four million people.

Her call comes 12 years after she successfully got the state legislature to pass a bill barring any state agencies from suing the NRA because, you know, residents’ abilities to shoot guns or open gun ranges wherever they is more important than everyone else’s right to a clean water supply and public parks they can go to that aren’t contaminated with lead.

This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2016.