After Parkland massacre, why would Florida’s elected leaders allow permitless carry? | Opinion

Monday night, East Lansing, Michigan, joined the long list of communities that will forever be marked by gun violence when a shooter opened fire at Michigan State University, killing three people and wounding five others. This is far from the first time this has happened.

In 2019, I graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. In the aftermath, we marched for our lives — not just people at my high school, but children and young people everywhere facing the fear and trauma of America’s gun violence crisis.

We spoke up, and lawmakers heard us. That same year, the Florida Legislature passed a number of strong gun-safety policies to help keep us safe, including an extreme-risk law that let’s authorities remove temporarily firearms from people who pose a danger to themselves and others, plus two additional measures to strengthen the gun-purchasing process.

Rallying again

Four years later, we found ourselves in a familiar situation. In the weeks after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, I joined fellow gun violence survivors and Students Demand Action volunteers in Washington D.C. — and in cities across the country — to walk out of school and rally for our lives once again. I met with other activists, shared my story with legislators and showed up for the families affected by gun violence in Uvalde, Buffalo and across the nation — just as so many did in 2018.

And once again, all of our tireless work amounted to meaningful change. Thanks to the advocacy of survivors and volunteers, President Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — a historic gun-safety, mental health and school-safety bill — into law, breaking a nearly 30-year logjam on federal gun-safety legislation. This encouraged me to keep fighting.

But even with the federal progress we saw last summer, action on gun safety has stalled in Florida since 2018. Lawmakers, instead, have tried to weaken our gun laws.

This year, we once again face the threat of extremism in Florida — Gov. DeSantis and his allies in the state Legislature are pushing permitless carry, a dangerous policy that would remove the state’s permitting requirement to carry a concealed firearm in public. The House advanced the bill quickly through the committee process, and the Senate has filed its own version of the bill that also includes a proposed expansion of the program that allows school employees to carry firearms on campus.

The permitting process is simple — without requiring too much time or money, it ensures those carrying guns in public have gone through a background check. As important, it also requires basic firearm training before one is granted a concealed-carry permit.

It is a simple public-safety guardrail that helps protect our communities from gun violence. It’s a system that many Florida voters support. The very representative who proposed the bill said he supports training and background checks, so why would we take these requirements away?

Pandering policy

The answer is clear: Despite being a dangerous and unpopular policy, Florida lawmakers continue to prioritize permitless carry because they are catering to the gun lobby that puts the industry’s bottom line above the safety of American communities. Dangerous gun laws like permitless carry are critical to the industry’s business model because they put more weapons in more hands with less responsibility. And instead of standing up to that industry, lawmakers are bowing to it, trying to score political points. And we are the ones left with trauma and grief in exchange for their profit.

We can’t afford to let politics and personal ambitions overwhelm the safety and security of Floridians. In the wake of so many mass shootings and news of gun violence across the country, the last thing we need is to weaken our gun laws with permitless carry.

Thankfully, the gun-safety movement is stronger than ever — led by survivors and activists like myself, who won’t stop calling out lawmakers who put politics over public safety.

We can make a difference in this fight, but we need everyone to stand up for what’s right. We, as voters, students — and as Americans — deserve to live in a world free of gun violence.

Catherine Allen is a volunteer with Students Demand Action in Florida and president of Students Demand Action at Florida State University.