Florida House Democrats were well into their weekly media availability Monday when caucus leader Fentrice Driskell announced that she’d just received notice on her cellphone of the active mass shooting happening in Louisville, Ky.
Driskell, and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was participating in the Zoom session, had been complaining that Republican supermajorities were ramming what the Dems consider unpopular bills through the House and Senate, including the new law allowing Floridians to carry concealed weapons without permits or safety training.
“America has a gun problem, and we must finally address it. Literally, an active shooter situation as we’re talking about what happened in Tennessee,” Driskell said, referring to her criticism of the expulsion from the Tennessee House of Representatives of two young, Black, male members who’d participated in a protest against gun violence.
“This has to stop. I mean, it just has to stop,” Driskell said.
We’ve now removed any sort of a training requirement for people to have before they get these firearms.
“I just worry that our country is headed into this state of vigilantism. And, before someone tells me that guns don’t kill, people do — when we’re so gun-crazed and so gun-obsessed, it leads to this culture where people start to think that guns are the only answer,” she said.
Five people, including the gunman, perished in the shootings that morning at Old National Bank in in downtown Louisville.
‘Extremist agenda’
Wasserman Schultz attributed legislation like Florida’s new gun bill to a “radical Republican extremist agenda.”
“While we were all still wiping the tears from our eyes over the latest mass school shooting in America [at a Nashville school], Republicans passed a permitless carry bill that nearly two-thirds of Floridians opposed,” the congresswoman said.
Specifically, she referred to survey results released last month by the Gifford Law Center suggesting that 61% of Floridians and 71% of Hispanic Floridians opposed permitless carry. Among Miami-Dade County voters, opposition reached 68 percent.
“The bottom line with Republicans in Tallahassee is they just don’t care. They don’t care what Florida families really want and need. They don’t care what we think. They don’t care who they hurt. We’ve seen it already when they put more guns in the hands of untrained firearm owners or when they hand millionaires our tax dollars to send their kids to private academies and hurt our public schools,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Republicans including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’d quietly signed the gun bill exactly one week earlier, argue the Second Amendment required empowering people to defend themselves with firearms.
Driskell pointed to data suggesting higher suicide-by-gun rates in rural communities in the U.S. South and West; see this report by The Guardian.
“Something that we don’t talk a lot about but I think we need to discuss is what’s happening in rural communities with respect to gun violence, and how there are so many suicides that take place there by guns, by firearms, right?” Driskell said.
“And it’s just a tragedy in our country that we can’t have open, honest decisions about this because people think that the Bill of Rights begins and ends with the Second Amendment, which it does not.”
Violence prevention office
The Nashville shooting killed three 9-year-old children and three adults. Also, police shot dead the shooter. The incident incited gun-safety demonstrations nationwide, including at the Tennessee capital, leading to the expulsion of Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, both Black Democrats in the House of Representatives. Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white female Democrat who also participated in the protest, was allowed to retain her seat.
In Orlando, meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost announced legislation to create an Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the U.S. Department of Justice to collect data and seek ways to reduce gun violence.
Three people, including a 7-year-old boy, died in gun violence in Orlando on Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Police shot and killed the gunman. That same day, five people were shot during a separate incident during an Easter egg hunt, with three of them pronounced dead, WESH reports.
“There’s not just one bill that will solve this problem. We need every possible solution available to stop this epidemic,” Frost said. He described his bill as “a critical first step in establishing gun violence prevention as an important priority for the federal government. If this legislation can save even a single life, it’s worth it. The time for action is now.”
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix