Days before the mass shooting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, students at the school advocated against a Senate bill that would introduce temporary sales tax cuts on firearms and ammunition from September 8 until December 31.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the bill earlier this year when he declared there would be a “Second Amendment Summer.”
The South Florida Sun Sentinel documented testimony from some of the students.
Dakota Bages, 20, is a college sophomore from Weston and one of many young people from Broward and Palm Beach counties who attend Florida State University, where the latest school shooting occurred Thursday.
She and others went to the Capitol last Tuesday to register their strong opposition to a Senate bill whose purpose is to get more people to buy guns.
As part of an array of tax cuts, Senate Bill 7034 exempts guns and ammunition from the 6% statewide sales tax for four months this year, from Sept. 8 until Dec. 31.
Bages said she believes in responsible gun ownership, and that her boyfriend’s stepfather, a retired Broward firefighter, safely owns and maintains firearms.
The students do not believe that it’s a good idea to put more guns into more and more hands in Florida.
“Until serious mental health reform is made in our state, we cannot make weapons any more accessible to people who seek to use them for the wrong reasons,” Bages told members of the Senate Finance & Tax Committee.
Bages said rural Putnam County near Jacksonville, which declared itself a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” had four times as many gun-related suicides as the state average in 2022 (the data is from the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University).
Jayden D’Onofrio, another FSU student, told the state legislature, “This legislation is making it easier for potential criminal thugs to purchase rifles … you all are giving a sale to potential violent people on the most dangerous things they could access – guns and ammunition.”
Several Democratic lawmakers opposed the bill. Sen. Mack Bernard said a four-month tax break is “way too long.”
It is unclear whether the mass shooting, which killed two people and wounded six, will influence the vote on the measure.
What folks like Bages and D’Onofrio don’t realize is that maintaining sales tax on firearms and ammunition wouldn’t have kept anyone at the FSU campus safe. The suspect, the son of a sheriff’s deputy, took his mother’s handgun and used it during the shooting.
Moreover, these students, just as most anti-gunners, can’t answer the most important question when they seek to exploit mass shootings to push an anti-gun agenda: What new gun control law would have prevented it from happening?
If anything, it would make more sense to remove FSU’s “gun-free zone” status and allow students and staff to carry firearms. This would be far more effective at stopping violent individuals than hiking the sales tax on firearms. Indeed, most violent criminals don’t even purchase their firearms legally in the first place, meaning that sales tax does not apply to them anyway.
In reality, having armed students and staff on campus would likely do more to prevent another mass shooting. I wrote earlier on a study from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which found that armed civilians are more likely to save lives during an active shooting incident than law enforcement.
A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center, authored by economist John R. Lott and Professor Carlisle E. Moody, takes a look at this question. The researchers examined 512 incidents involving active shooters that took place between 2014 and 2023. The study found that armed civilians with concealed carry permits not only stopped more mass shootings but also reduced casualties than law enforcement.
The report suggests that armed civilians are at lower risk of being injured or killed during these incidents compared to law enforcement.
The data showed that civilians intervened in 179 (34.96 percent) active shooter incidents as police became involved in 158 (30.86 percent) incidents. This makes sense given that armed civilians are more likely to be present in one of these situations than uniformed officers.
The problem is that many well-meaning people are irrationally frightened at the thought of everyday people carrying guns. They seem to believe it is safer to only allow police officers to be armed. Yet, when a mass shooting happens, police won’t be able to address the issue faster than an armed civilian in most cases. They should be more afraid to spend their days in gun-free zones where active shooters can easily kill their prey without resistance.
Nobody wants to see innocent people losing their lives to an active shooter. In times like these, the nation wonders what needs to be done to stop these horrific incidents. The solutions are multifaceted. But the data shows that the solution is not making it more difficult for law-abiding folks to keep and bear arms.