By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
The anti-gunners are trying to exploit their agenda via mob rule in Florida and Ohio initiatives after spending millions to buy successes in Washington State and Nevada, and narrowing losing in Maine.
Where they have failed to change laws through the legislative process, they are targeting the 2020 big-turnout presidential election years to win their way through direct appeal to the voters.
In Florida, steps have already been taken by the legislature and the governor to protect the state’s constitution from outsider influences, by the enactment and signing of HB-5, which contains an amendment by Rep. James Grant (R) to restore the right of Floridians to control the Florida citizen ballot initiative petition process.
The amendment is intended to stop out-of-state billionaires from crafting amendments to Florida’s Constitution, then sending paid, out-of-state petition gatherers into Florida to collect petition signatures to change the Constitution for the benefit of out-of-state special interests.
The House voted 105-0 to pass the Grant amendment with 15 House members not voting. The Senate concurred in the Grant amendment and passed the bill 22-17. On June 7, 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the bill into law.
Bill Cotterell, a reporter with the Tallahassee Democrat, framed it well in his article on June 8, 2019 when he said:
“When it takes effect, the bill will soon require people gathering petitions to register with the state and live in Florida, effectively eliminating a sort of cottage industry that specializes in crafting constitutional amendments and guiding them through the referendum process. It also forbids paying canvassers by how many voter signatures they gather.”
The new Sunshine State process takes effect in 30 days.
The National Rifle Association said these changes are critically important to gun owners, as anti-gunners repeatedly try to subvert the Constitution and Second Amendment rights by imposing gun bans and gun control through the ballot petition process.
The Miami Herald reported recently that a group pushing to ban so-called assault weapons in Florida has hit a significant milestone in its effort to place a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2020 ballot.
Ban Assault Weapons Now! (BAWN), an alleged bipartisan organization led in part by survivors of mass shootings in Orlando and Parkland, announced in June that it has obtained 103,000 signed petitions. The total should be enough to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review of its proposed ballot question, a mandatory step in the process.
The group held a press conference outside the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office after submitting thousands more signed petitions.
“Hundreds of thousands of Floridians across the state are getting behind this effort to place a ban on the ballot, because they know that this isn’t a partisan issue — this is an issue of public safety,” BAWN Chairwoman Gail Schwartz, the aunt of slain Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Alex Schachter, said in a statement reported by the Herald.
The announcement came two days before the third anniversary of the June 12 massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, during which a gunman with a legally purchased Sig Sauer MCX rifle killed 49 people. Pulse survivors Ricardo Negron-Almodovar and Brandon Wolf are on the BAWN steering committee, as are the parents of Pulse victims Jerry Wright and Drew Leinonen.
The organization must compile 766,200 signed petitions from verified voters by February in order to get a constitutional amendment on the 2020 ballot. The verification process is conducted by local election supervisors, and a mandatory Supreme Court review is triggered once 10 percent of the requisite signatures are obtained. A court review can take several months but won’t stop BAWN from seeking more petition signatures.
The fact that it would apply to firearms capable of holding 10 rounds by detachable magazine seems very broad. The caveat is that all legally owned “assault weapons” before the ban would remain legal if registered.
Schwartz told the media that she’s confident the ballot question will make it before voters in 2020 and pass, but her organization still has a lot of work to do. It so far has submitted only about 10 percent of the 1.1 million signatures it plans to gather in order to meet the ballot question threshold. And it has little more than half a year to do it, and there is the question of whether her group can meet the required contained in the newly signed HR-5 amendment.
Meanwhile, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Ohio voters might have the opportunity to decide whether to require “background checks for gun purchases at the same time they vote for president in the 2020 election.”
Ohioans for Gun Safety announced in early June that it is filing petitions to support a proposal that would effectively require background checks for all gun sales online and at gun shows.
The measure, titled “An Act to Close Loopholes in Background Checks on Gun Sales,” is designed as an initiated statute.
That means supporters must gather enough valid signatures of registered Ohio voters to equal at least 3% of the total vote cast in the most recent gubernatorial election, roughly 135,000 signatures. The names must come from 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties and represent 1.5% of the total vote for governor in each of those counties.
If the threshold is met, the General Assembly has four months to consider the proposal. If it is not acted upon, fails to pass or is passed in an amended form, the petitioners can mount a second petition drive to put the proposed law on the ballot. Another 135,000 signatures are necessary.
The proposal would add a “Weapons Control” section to the Ohio Revised Code that would require involvement of a firearms dealer and a background check in nearly every gun purchase.
“The polling has shown that even people who are gun owners and strong Second Amendment rights people believe that this is not an intrusive idea,” said Dennis Willard, a spokesman for the gun control group. “We think very much that people will support this.”
Jim Irvine, president of the Buckeye Firearms Association, is skeptical of the proposal’s benefit, saying it addresses an issue that does not exist, the Dispatch reported.
“There is no gun show loophole,” he said. “The rules to buying and selling guns at gun shows are the same to buy a gun at a gun store or out of the back of a car or a garage or anywhere else. The most common way criminals get their guns is stealing them. So what will this law do to stop those bad criminals from getting guns? Nothing!”
The laws regulating popular initiatives may vary from state to state, but the anti-gunners apparently think they have found a feasible route to success.