On April 17, seven people were shot, two of them fatally, at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Just a mile from campus, at the State Capitol, Republican lawmakers are trying to unwind a raft of gun reforms passed in the wake of another school shooting. It marks a radical reversal from just a few years ago.
Less than a month after the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida’s GOP-dominated Legislature created a red flag law, implemented a three-day waiting period for rifle purchases, and raised the minimum age to buy semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21. (The perpetrator legally bought the murder weapon, a rifle, at 18.)
The laws marked a turning point in Florida history, as they were the first in decades to restrict gun access. Since then, state lawmakers have worked to loosen gun laws, undoing some of the bipartisan progress they made in the aftermath of the Parkland massacre.
In other states, and sometimes nationally, public mass shootings motivate calls for legislative change. The 2022 Uvalde school shooting in Texas spurred Congress to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which strengthened background checks for gun buyers under 21, banned guns for abusive dating partners for at least five years, and created federal offenses for gun trafficking. In the wake of a 2022 massacre at a Buffalo supermarket that left 10 dead, New York lawmakers passed a slew of concealed carry restrictions.
Florida has gone in the other direction. In 2023, the state eliminated license and training requirements for carrying concealed guns. Parkland survivors and gun reform advocates considered it a betrayal. “It’s not going to make our communities safer,” Orange County Sheriff John Mina, who responded to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, said in 2023. “It’s going to make them more dangerous.”
Andrew Willinger, the executive director of Duke University’s Center for Firearms Law, said the political landscape around guns has shifted since Parkland, and Republican lawmakers no longer feel comfortable backing gun reform like they did in 2018.
“I think this has something to do with the emergence of some of these gun rights groups that are more extreme and less willing to compromise on any form of gun regulation,” Willinger said. “Some of the Florida politicians are finding themselves in this precarious position where the floor’s moving underneath them. They were supporting things after Parkland that at the time they may have thought, ‘Well, this is OK. The gun rights constituencies that I have are probably going to be on board with this.’ And now that has changed.”
That opposition to gun reform includes outright defiance of codified law. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who assumed office in February, has said he will not be enforcing the post-Parkland age restriction on rifles. An appeals court upheld the restriction in 2023, but Uthmeier has criticized that decision, and legislative efforts to repeal the law have repeatedly failed. A new bill that would reverse the law passed the state House in March but is stalled in the Senate.
Also this session, GOP lawmakers have pitched a bill that would allow students to carry guns on college campuses — like Florida State University. The campus carry measure was voted down in a Senate committee last month, but could be taken up again this session.
In a statement after the FSU shooting, March For Our Lives, the youth gun reform group formed by Marjory Stoneman Douglas students after the shooting there, pointed to the state’s regression on gun laws: “In Florida, state lawmakers are actively making the situation worse by working to repeal the very gun safety measures enacted after Parkland.”
Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office after the 2018 post-Parkland reforms, said last month that he wants to revoke the state’s red flag law. The law — signed by DeSantis’s predecessor Rick Scott — allows law enforcement to petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from people determined to be a risk to themselves or others.
After the FSU shooting, DeSantis offered “prayers” on social media. March For Our Lives responded: “Your ‘prayers’ don’t mean a damn thing when you’ve spent years blocking every common sense gun law and making Florida more dangerous.”
Ava Sasani and Aaron Mendelson contributed reporting to this story.
Clarification: This story was updated to specify that 232 people died from gun suicides and gun homicides between 2018 and 2023 in Leon County, Florida.
