Flori-duh alert: Mandatory shooting classes for Florida public high school students? | Frank Cerabino

It takes a lot to be Florida’s worst legislator. The competition is fierce.

But state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, R-Howey-in-the-Hills, certainly tries the hardest at being awful.

“Marksmanship should be a required class in every Florida public high school,” Sabatini tweeted last week.

“My grades are pretty good, Mom. I would have had all A’s and B’s, but I had a misfire in my Glock lab.”

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Sabatini's proposal is a special kind of crazy, and yet not that surprising from him. After all, he's the lawmaker who also suggested that the teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse ought to run for U.S. Congress.

It’s Sabatini who is running for U.S. Congress these days, and he has such little regard for the people of Florida that he imagines he will improve his chances of winning by pointing out the lack of shooting skills exhibited by Florida’s high school teens.

It used to be that if you wanted to be a provocative lawmaker, you’d talk about schools getting back to mandatory classes in penmanship.

But marksmanship? We’re breaking some ground here. Very low ground.

Step aside, Matt Gaetz. There’s a new poser looking to elbow you out of some Fox News face time.

High school and guns don't mix in Florida

I know what you’re thinking. You can’t even buy a gun in Florida until you’re 21 years old.

That became the law in Florida after Nikolas Cruz, at the age of 19, went on a shooting rampage four years ago at his former school. In the wake of that, state lawmakers were temporarily chastened enough to make a rare concession, agreeing that putting guns in the hands of teenagers was probably not a good idea in terms of public safety.

Cruz showed up at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Valentine’s Day 2018 with an AR-15-style rifle, which he fired repeatedly as he walked down the halls of the school, indiscriminately killing 17 people and wounding another 17.

A jury is being assembled to decide whether Cruz, who has pleaded guilty to the murders, should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

There has been a lot written about Cruz and the events of that day, which stand as the deadliest high school school shooting in U.S. history. Some of those writings have concentrated on his high school experiences, and how the system may have failed to help him.

But no one has lamented that his high school experience in Florida was missing some mandatory marksmanship classes.

You’d have to be an idiot, or apparently a Republican running for Congress in Florida, to think that. And to go in a matter of a few years from a posture of keeping guns out of the hands of teenagers to making it mandatory for them to shoot guns, is quite a leap.

And it’s not like the Parkland massacre was an outlier, either.

Last year was the worst year for school shootings in more than two decades, according to a school shooting database kept by The Washington Post.

A long history of school shootings

There were 34 school shootings in the United States last year, even though part of the year students attended school virtually rather than in person due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, there have been shootings in 310 schools, combining for 157 deaths and 356 students and teachers wounded, the Post detailed.

In January, at Seminole High School in Sanford, just 40 miles from Sabatini’s district office, a 16-year-old student brought a handgun to school, and used it to shoot an 18-year-old football team member following an argument over a girl.

The shooter shot the older boy three times, but didn’t kill him.

Sounds like a marksmanship issue.

Maybe with some of those proposed mandatory marksmanship classes Sabatini wants, that 16-year-old shooter would have been more effective with his handgun skills.

Sabatini’s never out of bad ideas when it comes to guns.

Sabatini never out of bad ideas for guns

This past legislative session, Sabatini championed a doomed bill to allow Florida’s gun owners to carry their guns openly in public. He failed to get a Senate co-sponsor from his own party to move the bill along.

That’s what sunk his bill. But instead, he blamed Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls, a fellow Republican, calling him a RINO – Republican In Name Only.

“RINO Cowards like Chris Sprowls are once again BLOCKING Constitutional Carry! When will people wake up and vote these TRASH establishment ‘Republicans’ out?!” Sabatini tweeted. “FYI – if your Representative and/or Senator is silent on Constitutional Carry, that means they are working AGAINST you!!!”

When Sabatini is not promoting more firearms, he’s pushing QAnon conspiracy theories, filing frivolous lawsuits against COVID-19 restrictions or talking about how Anthony Fauci, the director or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is part of a sinister plot.

“One of the most evil people in the history of the United States, Dr. Fauci, who should have his titles and credentials yanked and spend the rest of his life in prison, for the destruction he caused,” Sabatini told Club 45 USA, a Palm Beach County Trump-cult group, last year.

“This man used and abused the pandemic to increase the power of the government to cause enough chaos to try to give Joe Biden a chance to win the presidency.

“And we know, Joe Biden did not really win the presidency,” Sabatini said.

It was already easy to consign Sabatini to the political clown car before he proposed requiring all Florida’s high school kids to take shooting classes.

Now, he’s just signaling that his political compass is leading him toward being an even bigger clown.

fcerabino@gannett.com

@FranklyFlorida

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: State Rep. Anthony Sabatini wants marksmanship classes in high schools