As Florida students head to state capital, lawmakers fail to take up assault rifle bill

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed last week, were traveling on Tuesday to Tallahassee, the state capital, to call for an assault weapons ban. The direct appeal to the Legislature follows protests outside schools, social media appeals and national television appearances.

— Assault rifles have become a particular target of the latest gun-control campaign. The police say the suspect in Feb. 14’s massacre, Nikolas Cruz, was able to kill 17 people in just six minutes by wielding a semi-automatic weapon, an AR-15 rifle.

— President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to propose regulations to ban so-called bump stocks, which can convert a semi-automatic gun into an automatic weapon like the one used last year in the Las Vegas shooting.

— A Washington Post/ABC News opinion poll released Tuesday showed that 77 percent of Americans believe the Republican-controlled Congress is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings, with 62 percent saying Trump has not done enough.

— On Monday, the White House indicated that Trump was open to supporting a bipartisan effort to revise federal background checks for prospective gun buyers.

— The Florida shooting has renewed attention on state laws that allow a judge to take away weapons from people who are deemed dangerous, known as “red flag” laws. Some governors have shown a willingness to change their mind on gun restrictions, but other simply dug in on their stances.

— In Florida, an AR-15 is easier to buy than a handgun.

— Florida House Rejects Motion to Take Up Bill Banning Assault Rifles

State Rep. Kionne McGhee, D-Miami, asked for an unusual procedural move to consider his legislation, which had been filed earlier in the session but was never scheduled for a hearing.

“The shooting in Parkland demands extraordinary action,” McGhee said Tuesday on the House floor, as a group of Stoneman Douglas High students who had previously arrived peered down from the gallery.

The motion failed, 36-71, in a vote along party lines. At least one student burst into tears, McGhee said. One girl covered her mouth in despair, as a woman patted her arm to comfort her. The episode lasted 2 minutes and 38 seconds.

As the news began to spread aboard a bus of students headed to the capital, Anthony Lopez, 16, a junior, slammed his head back on the bus seat. He placed a hand on his forehead. “That’s infuriating,” he said. “They’re acting inhuman.”

“The one fear we have is that nothing will change,” he added.

A similar proposal filed last year in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando also went nowhere.

Republican leaders in the Legislature have said they would consider more modest proposals, including raising the minimum age to buy assault rifles, before the session ends in March. The Miami Herald reported that legislators in both the Florida House and Senate were also drafting legislation to limit access to semi-automatic rifles, after years of reluctance. That plan would bar people under 21 from possession of an assault rifle, and would require buyers to wait three days before purchasing any kind of rifle.

“The House looks forward to working with the Governor and Senate to find solutions to fulfill government’s primary mission — to keep its citizens — its children safe,” said Richard Corcoran, the Republican speaker of the House, in a statement. “And it is our goal to give these collective solutions the serious review and consideration they deserve.”

In session later Tuesday, the House did approve a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk. Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, questioned why the pornography proposal was given priority. Implicit in his question was why the assault weapons ban was not.

“Has anyone ever been killed as a result of the health implications of pornography?” he asked.

Buoyed by viral tweets and media interviews, several Stoneman Douglas students who survived the attack have been vocal about wanting change since the shooting. Their message: We’ve been there. Listen to us.

At first, the students gained notice for their raw, emotional reactions in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The emotion has not receded, but efforts to channel their grief into legislative change have been widely praised.

On Tuesday, teenagers from the school, gripping pillows and sleeping bags and carrying doughnuts and candy, packed a grocery store parking lot in Coral Springs to begin the more than 400-mile journey to Tallahassee.

Their goal: persuading lawmakers to pass a slate of gun control bills in a state that has been among the friendliest to firearm owners in the nation.

Many had come straight from the funeral of one of the dead. They hugged their parents goodbye and loaded backpacks into the bellies of three buses. Dozens climbed aboard.

On bus two, Julia Bishop and Daniel Bishop, best friends and siblings, sat side-by-side. They are 18 and 16.

“This shooting is different from the other ones,” Daniel Bishop said. “Sandy Hook, they were elementary school kids who couldn’t stand up for themselves; Virginia Tech was 2007, a different time. But this one, I just have a gut feeling — something is going to change.”

In a telephone interview from the bus, Sarah Chadwick, 16, a junior, said the social media response to the students had been overwhelming, but she wanted everyone to know: “We see your support, we see what you’re doing.”

The students felt they had the “best voices to listen to right now,” along with other survivors of shootings, and that Twitter had allowed them to reach more people than they would have thought possible, she said.

“We have stuff to say, and we won’t be silenced after a matter of days, or even weeks,” she said.

— Students March in Spontaneous Show of Support

Before marching south toward Stoneman Douglas, dozens of students from West Boca Raton High School first gathered in the courtyard of their school for a peaceful protest — 17 minutes of silence for the 17 victims — but then someone opened a door and walked out, and others followed, a videotape of the scene aired by WPTV showed.

“Everybody started walking,” one student told the news channel. “It felt like half the school was walking.”

As the students walked south on U.S. Highway 441, sheriff’s deputies lined the road to direct traffic and keep them safe, but did not interfere. The distance between the two schools is about 10 miles.

The march from Boca Raton surprised Broward County officials, who said they had heard nothing about the protest. Todd DeAngelis, a spokesman for the city of Parkland, said the authorities abruptly assembled an escort by law enforcement and organized water stations on a day when the temperature was in the low 80s.

— Hundreds of Mourners, Including Military, Honor JROTC Member at His Funeral

In a rare honor, the U.S. Military Academy offered the member, Peter Wang, 15, the realization of a lifelong dream: admission to West Point, posthumously. The academy said it was extending the offer in recognition of his “heroic actions” during the shooting.

Wang was last seen holding a door open at Stoneman Douglas High so that others could escape, Ernie Rospierski, a teacher who survived, told CBS News.

Relatives of Wang, a cadet in the school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, described him as modest and not interested in status, but eager to serve and help others.

At his funeral Tuesday, the military mourners acknowledged him as one of them. They came in echoes of the uniform that he had once proudly worn: Marine and Navy dress blues, high school ROTC members in their dress uniforms, others wearing camouflage fatigues. Veterans were in attendance, as well.

“We came down to represent,” said Jeff Colopy, vice commander of American Legion Post 157 in Margate, Florida, to “pay tribute to one of our fallen comrades. In our eyes, he was military.”

Lying in an open coffin in the small chapel at Kraeer Funeral Home and Cremation Center in Coral Springs, with a military honor guard at either end, Wang wore his uniform. A line of mourners stretched out of the chapel, with scores more waiting under a tent outside.

Wang was one of three JROTC cadets who were killed in the shooting; the others were Martin Duque, 14, and Alaina Petty, also 14.

The shooting suspect, Cruz, had also been a member of his school’s Army JROTC and had “excelled” in air rifle marksmanship contests with other schools in the area in a program that was supported by a grant from the National Rifle Association Foundation, according to The Associated Press. He was wearing his maroon JROTC emblem polo shirt when he was arrested after the shooting, The AP reported.

“We all have those shirts,” Angelyse Perez, an 18-year-old senior and a company commander, told The Washington Post. “We’re never wearing them again. We’re going to destroy them all.”

— Protests Ripple Out Across the Nation

At rallies across the country on Monday and Tuesday, students made pleas for gun control and declared that while they might not be old enough to vote, they were old enough to change society.

A crowd of students stood on the steps of the squat, red-brick public library in Toms River, New Jersey, on Monday, a school holiday, to express their solidarity with the fallen Parkland students and teachers.

In Chicago, students from the South Side, where gun violence has been a problem, began organizing to demand gun control legislation.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, dozens of students walked out of Harper Creek High School on Tuesday to protest gun violence in schools.

And in Bakersfield, California, about a dozen students and 80 adults joined a protest on Monday. “Listening to how worried my mother was dropping me off Friday morning after the shooting was one of the worst things I’ve had to listen to in a while,” Lucy Brown, a member of the Bakersfield High School Young Democrats Club who helped organize the protests, told bakersfield.com.

— Some States Are Considering ‘Red Flag’ Laws

The Florida shooting has renewed attention on state laws that allow a judge to remove weapons from people deemed dangerous, known as “red flag” laws. The measures are frequently supported by Democrats, but opposed by many Republicans and gun rights advocates.

State Rep. Arthur O’Neill, R-Conn., one of only five states to have such laws, has said he would write to legislative leaders in other states to urge them to adopt similar laws. “Unfortunately, this law is not as widely known as it should be,” O’Neill said last week in a statement.

In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Daylin Leach announced Tuesday that he was proposing red flag legislation.

“Frequently, when there are mass shootings, we see stories about how the shooter made threats, posted on social media, and did all kinds of things showing that he was a danger to the community, yet nothing was done,” Leach, a Democrat, said in a statement. “My new bill would allow a judge to separate dangerous people from their guns until they get the help they need.”

Similar bills have been proposed this year in other states, including Hawaii and Illinois. The National Rifle Association has often spoken against red flag legislation, saying the judges’ orders can infringe on a person’s Second Amendment rights when no crime has been committed.

— Governors in Vermont and Ohio Have Signaled a Shift Toward Tighter Controls

In Vermont, a progressive but rural state with largely permissive gun laws, Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, initially told reporters the state’s gun laws did not need to be updated after the Florida shooting, according to news reports. But Scott changed his tone a day later, after the authorities accused an 18-year-old student of planning an attack at his school in Fair Haven, Vermont.

“We must determine if we are truly doing all we can to prevent violence,” Scott said, and asked legislative leaders to identify policy changes and have “an open conversation about gun safety.”

In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who has previously touted support from the National Rifle Association, made an impassioned plea for Congress to consider restrictions on assault weapons.

“Would you feel as though your Second Amendment rights would be eroded because you couldn’t buy a God darn AR-15?” Kasich, who voted for an assault weapons ban in 1994 while in Congress, asked on CNN. “These are the things that have to be looked at.”

In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, repeated a position he took late last month after a 15-year-old shot and killed two fellow students at a high school in Benton, Kentucky. Bevin suggested in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer that it was violent video games and culture, rather than guns, that should be restricted.

In Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, the Democratic governor, reiterated calls for stronger state and federal measures.

“We need to outlaw military-style assault weapons like our neighbors have in Massachusetts and Connecticut,” Raimondo told The Providence Journal, also calling for a ban on high-capacity magazines.

And in Idaho, according to The Statesman, Gov. C.L. Otter, a Republican, suggested there was little more the state could do to prevent school shootings. “I think we’ve done what we can do,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Pornography Control Committee to go after People Like Sheebah

As Florida students head to state capital, lawmakers fail to take up assault rifle bill

From California to Florida, teenagers walked out of classes, stopped traffic and made stirring speeches calling out their elders for inaction.

Enhance Your Pulse News Experience!

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!