State Sen. Lauren Book worries landmark Parkland legislation ‘wouldn’t pass today’
When lawmakers rushed to pass legislation last year responding to the Parkland shooting, many promised it would be just the beginning: a $400 million compromise of gun restrictions, mental health funding and school safety measures.
But as legislators prepare to grapple with potential changes to the signature law ahead of their annual session’s start, it is unclear what they will agree on, absent the crucible of a national spotlight and the roiling shock of Florida’s deadliest school shooting fresh on their minds.
The Legislature that will return to Tallahassee in a few weeks is substantially different from the one that narrowly compromised last year. About a quarter of the lawmakers who voted on the contentious legislation have left, replaced by newcomers who were not present for the thousands-strong protests that filled the Capitol for days, students who wept in the House gallery, or the debates where lawmakers demanded somberly that doing nothing was no longer an option.
The political climate has also changed, said state Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, who was one of the lawmakers who helped build consensus for the bill that she said “would never pass today.”
“We’re in a different place,” Book said recently in her Capitol office. “I don’t know that today there would be the fortitude to stand up to some of the entities that folks had to stand up to.”
The Parkland legislation, which was the first measure in two decades to increase gun restrictions in Florida, came about in part thanks to Book, who coordinated a gut-wrenchingly emotional Capitol visit for scores of Douglas students that swayed some lawmakers to support the compromise bill.
Book, with several legislative leaders, also walked the halls of Building 12 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School so soon after the shooting that blood still stained the laminate floors. It was in the back of a car leaving the high school campus that Book, with now Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, and Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, first heard Galvano sketch out what would become the landmark bill.
She recalled the classrooms frozen in time by a spray of bullets, her eyes welling with tears when she remembered how other lawmakers insisted something had to change.
But this year, exactly what those changes should be has become the focus of more polarized debate, she said.
Lawmakers have already been embroiled in debate over a key recommendation from the Stoneman Douglas commission, which Book sits on, to amend the controversial “guardian program” to include educators — a proposal that failed to make it into the bill last year and that many Democrats continue to bitterly oppose. There are also debates over mental health funding and programs that are likely to be revisited in an omnibus bill to tweak last year’s legislation.
Some lawmakers are hoping to use the next year to broaden the scope of what the Parkland bill accomplished. Rep. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, called on Gov. Ron DeSantis this month to create a commission to look at gun violence in minority communities in the same way the Parkland commission has. After a meeting this week, DeSantis plans to visit South Florida to meet with victims’ families before making a decision, Jones said.
Lawmakers from both parties are deadlocked in their usual patterns on issues like gun control: Some Republicans have filed bills calling to repeal the Parkland gun provisions or allow concealed carrying on college campuses. (The Parkland gun provisions are being contested by a lawsuit filed by the NRA, which is ongoing.)
House Democrats are pushing a slate of a dozen gun-control bills, ranging from the perennial effort to ban assault weapons to stronger safe storage laws for guns, though several bills are unlikely to gain traction with Republican leadership.
Book says she doesn’t doubt other lawmakers’ commitments to following up on last year’s legislation. But, she says, everyone’s lenses have changed. Her own, she said, is different after having sat for a year on the commission, going through the facts of how the shooting unfolded.
She rattles through the numbers: 69 seconds before a law enforcement officer was called to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The 22 people who had already been injured or killed when that call was made. The just-shy of four minutes before the shooting ended.
She debates daily whether arming teachers would have helped prevent the shooting and is still undecided on how she will vote on changes to the Parkland bill: “Even if we had all of the money in the world, and we don’t, we don’t have the people. We know what we have doesn’t work.”
This year’s legislative environment is more politically polarized, and Book suggested that politics have returned to a “tribal atmosphere” encouraged by the national sphere.
“We’re looking at this again and I’m highly, highly nervous about the way that we look at this,” she said. More policy-centric issues regarding mental health and social services, she fears, have gotten significantly less attention.
“What does everyone want to pay attention to? It’s this,” she said, referring to guns. “And they want to create this division.”
After the flowers are wilted, the bells done ringing, the flags hoisted back up from half-staff where they marked Parkland’s first anniversary Thursday, the problem of how to solve Parkland will remain for lawmakers. Book said she and other Broward legislators still live with the tragedy daily.
“I think that my community is still in a very raw place and still dealing with so much,” she said. “I think we’re still in really dark times. There’s still no closure. I don’t know we’ll ever get closure.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2019 at 3:21 PM.
