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AP: No widespread changes in gun laws after recent shootings
By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press
Shortly after last year’s shooting massa- cre on the Las Vegas strip, Ohio Gov. John Kasich convened a panel to explore possible reforms to state gun laws.
A Republican, Kasich wanted to be sure its members clearly supported the Second Amendment. Yet it also was to be biparti- san, representing views across the political spectrum.
The panel’s work accelerated after the Valentine’s Day slaughter at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and it eventually produced a legislative package that Kasich said repre- sented “sensible changes that should keep people safer.” The legislation was introduced by a Republican lawmaker in the GOP-dom- inated Legislature.
It went nowhere.
Among other objections, the Republican leadership raised constitutional concerns about a provision allowing courts to order that weapons be seized from people showing signs of violence.
“The way we put it together, the fact that you had people on both sides of the issue — I would have thought something would have happened,” said Kasich, who watched the bill package languish in legislative chambers run by his own party. “But the negative voices come in unison and they come strongly.”
The Ohio experience is not unusual.
An Associated Press review of all fire- arms-related legislation passed this year, encompassing the first full state legislative sessions since the Las Vegas attack, shows a decidedly mixed record. Gun control bills did pass in a number of states, but the year was not the national game-changer that gun-control advocates had hoped it could be.
Even in a year that included yet another mass school shooting and an unprecedented level of gun-control activism, state legisla- tures across the country fell back to largely predictable and partisan patterns.
“It’s exactly what happened after New- town: The anti-gun states became more an- ti-gun and the pro-gun states became more pro-gun,” said Michael Hammond, the leg- islative counsel for Gun Owners of America,
referring to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 20 children and six educators.
The major exceptions were Florida and Vermont.
Both states have Republican governors and long traditions of gun ownership. Lawmak- ers passed sweeping legislation after the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 14 students and three staff members and after a foiled school shooting plot in Vermont days later.
The law signed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott banned bump stocks, raised the gun buying age to 21, imposed a three-day waiting pe- riod for purchases and authorized police to seek court orders seizing guns from individ- uals who are deemed threats to themselves and others. The latter provision has already been used hundreds of times, court data show.
Florida is a rare case in which gun laws approved by a Republican legislature and governor are being challenged in court by the NRA.
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No other Republican-dominated state followed Florida’s lead, the AP review found.
The Parkland shooting did slow momen- tum for additional gun rights bills in some Republican-led states, but others pushed forward with a pro-gun policy agenda. They widened the definition of who can legally carry a weapon in public, allowed more
concealed weapons in schools, churches and government buildings, and strengthened legal protections for people who claim they shot someone in self-defense.
In Tennessee, county commissioners
were granted the ability to carry concealed handguns in their workplaces. Oklahoma ap- proved a bill allowing permit holders to carry handguns while scouting. Nebraska lawmak- ers enacted a long-sought bill shielding all documents related to gun permits from the state’s open records law.
In South Carolina, where a state senator was killed in the 2015 church shooting in Charleston, lawmakers rejected a simple bill requiring court clerks to enter convictions and restraining orders in a timely fashion to strip gun rights from people who have been disqualified from possessing firearms.
The most significant policy development, the review found, was the enactment of so- called “red flag laws” in eight states. Those laws allow police or relatives to seek court orders to seize guns from people who are showing signs of violence.
Five Republican governors signed those laws, which have been used to seize guns from hundreds of individuals already this year.
Supporters say the laws are proven to
save lives, and they were a rallying cry amid reports that the suspected Parkland high school gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was deeply troubled yet allowed to own guns. Nine states
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