On Parkland fifth anniversary, gun safety advocates cite 'less progress' than expected

The 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre seemed to have changed national attitudes on gun safety legislation. But on this Valentine's Day, the fifth anniversary of that tragedy in Parkland, Florida, gun-safety advocates fear the state is sliding backward.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is vowing to make Florida the 26th state that allows gun owners to carry weapons without a permit or training, dubbed "constitutional carry" by supporters.

"Basically, this was something that I’ve always supported,” DeSantis said in a Lee County appearance Dec. 16. “The last two years, it was not necessarily a priority for the legislative leadership. But we’ve been talking about it, and he’s (Florida House Speaker Paul Renner) pledged publicly that’s moving forward, and it’ll be something that will be done in the regular session."

That's a marked departure from the bipartisan success in the wake of the rampage at the northern Broward County high school, when Florida legislators responded by implementing so-called "red flag" laws, allowing courts to remove weaponry from people deemed to be a risk, and raising the age to buy a gun to 21.

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In a tweet late last month, after Renner announced support for the removal of the gun-permit requirement in the state, gun-safety advocate Fred Guttenberg tweeted that the so-called constitutional carry provision is really "political carry."

Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime, then 14, was killed at Parkland, wrote that the proposed legislation "will add more guns in more places to solve a problem that doesn't exist."

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Tallahassee Democrats agree, saying the measure reverts progress on gun control, said state Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, who filed a legislative measure Jan. 10 to require background checks on the sales of ammunition, also known as Jaime's Law, named after Guttenberg's daughter.

"More guns don't make us safer, and we live in a dangerous state and we should be pushing laws that change behavior and are in line for what gun owners are looking for," Polsky said. "Gun owners want to do the right thing, but politicians seem to be pushing more guns with less regulation."

Florida legislative Democrats are in the minority in the state Capitol, making it virtually impossible for them to derail any initiatives, on guns and other matters, proposed by the Republican supermajority.

Jaime's Law has been filed three times previously in the legislative docket. When asked if the bill would be pushed through the Republican supermajority in the Legislature this year, Polsky responded: "It's not."

Robert Schentrup of Brady United, a national gun-reform group, lost his 16-year-old sister, Carmen, in the Parkland shooting. He said the goals for gun-safety reform have been changing, because the initial goal after Parkland was to reduce gun violence 25% by 2025. Since 2018, gun violence has gone up nationwide.

"There is less national progress than there was hoping to be five years ago," Schentrup said.

Schentrup said he is not surprised by the permitless carry measure, but said it was disheartening. He said that movements such as the youth-run group within his organization are necessary to bring Florida gun safety reform "across the finish line."

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Gun safety reforms also are being pursued in Congress, but the outlook there, too, is clouded.

Last summer, in the wake of another tragic mass school shooting, this time in Texas, a bipartisan coalition approved and President Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun-safety legislation passed by Congress in three decades. The law includes incentives for states to pass red flag laws like the one implemented in Florida after Parkland.

In his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, Biden called for a ban on assault weapons.

"I led the fight to do that in 1994. And in 10 years that ban was law, mass shootings went down," Biden said. "After we let it expire in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled. Let’s finish the job and ban these assault weapons." Confessed Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle in the attack, killing 17 students and teachers and wounding 17 others. He avoided the death penalty by a jury and was sentenced to life in prison in October.

In November's midterm election, Republicans won a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, albeit a slim four-seat one, and with an emboldened and empowered far-right caucus, meaningful gun legislation seems doubtful.

Still, freshman U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Parkland, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas alum who was named vice chair of a Gun Violence Prevention Task Force in Congress, said the first step is to begin finding common ground. This task force is made of a bipartisan group of lawmakers "working to find common-sense solutions to reduce gun violence in the United States," according to a Jan. 9 press statement from Moskowitz's team.

Moskowitz said in an interview that with Republicans dominating the U.S. House, and with Florida's Republican supermajority in Tallahassee, the only thing that can be done legislatively right now is having "conversations with the other side and figure out where there's going to be some agreement." He noted that threat assessment legislation for gun violence could have bipartisan support as well.

"We're going to have these massive events until we do something about it substantially," Moskowitz said. "We won't prevent them all, but we can do a lot to mitigate them."

Five years of little progress

Since Parkland, the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, gun violence has increased, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that produces gun violence data.

Moskowitz, who was in the Legislature at the time of the shooting and helped obtain passage of the 2018 reforms, said Florida has used its red flag law 9,000 times since it was passed.

"The fact that that bill still exists five years later, the fact that there's no effort to repeal that bill, proves that gun violence prevention works," Moskowitz said.

Stephany Matat is a journalist at the Palm Beach Post, part of the Paste BN Florida Network. You can reach her at smatat@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.