The legacy of Parkland: Changes in school safety and gun laws

Lives changed. Laws changed. But some things did not.

The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School five years ago scarred South Florida, touching off a national gun-control movement whose ripples could still be felt as recently as Tuesday night’s State of the Union address in Washington, D.C.

In the aftermath of the shooting, even conservative Florida raised the minimum age required to purchase a firearm in Florida from 18 to 21. Through “red-flag” laws, some law-abiding citizens lost access to their weapons because people close to them were afraid the guns might be used in ways that are not protected by the Second Amendment.

Those changes were once considered unlikely in a state where the governor’s mansion, the state Legislature, and the Supreme Court have been in NRA-friendly Republican hands for a generation. But typical political lines were blurred after the murders of 17 children and teachers in a suburban school in an affluent neighborhood.

A month after the 2018 shooting, survivors were joined by students around the world for “March for Our Lives,” one of the largest protests in American history. Millions marched in Washington, D.C., and around the world that day to demand action to end the gun-violence epidemic. There were over 800 marches around the world and youth voter registrations. Those registrations led to action.

“I am really proud that we have had such a massive youth voter turnout,” David Hogg, a co-founder of March for Our Lives, told the Sun Sentinel. “We are clearly voting disproportionately for candidates that support gun safety. It wasn’t just in 2018 or 2020. It was also in 2022. We have done it when Republicans were in power and when Democrats were in power. Every election we are voting.”

In the most recent election, Maxwell Frost, the 25-year-old former March for Our Lives national director, won a seat in Congress from Florida’s 10th Congressional District.

Hogg said it takes time to create the amount of change needed, adding: “the gun-control movement has gotten substantially stronger since we entered it.”

Virginia passed universal background checks and its own red-flag law.

New Jersey passed increasingly progressive gun-control laws in 2018, 2019 and 2022.

Last year, Colorado banned firearms at polling sites.

And Congress last year passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first federal gun-control legislation in 30 years, which provides funding for community-based violence prevention initiatives and funds background checks and mental health courts.

“It wasn’t passive, but it was a hell of a lot more progress than has been made in my entire lifetime,” Hogg said. “Objectively, we still have a long way to go.”

Gun-control laws weren’t the only changes. Florida and New Jersey passed versions of Alyssa’s Law, named for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victim Alyssa Alhadeff. It requires public elementary and secondary schools to be equipped with “silent panic alarms that are directly linked to law enforcement.” Alyssa Alhadeff’s mother, Lori, was elected to the Broward County School Board in 2018.

Four other states are considering similar laws, and a federal version is also being considered in Congress.

Tony Montalto, who lost his daughter, Gina, in the shooting, said, “Each time we pass a law, change a policy that makes students and parents safer in school, it extends the legacy of the students taken from us.”

The changes that were implemented remain part of the legal legacy of the Parkland mass shooting. But gun rights remain a hot political issue, high-powered weapons like the AR-15 style rifle remain widely available, and mass shootings at churches, schools and shopping centers remain in the headlines.

“Ban assault weapons once and for all,” President Biden said during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. “We did it before. I led the fight to ban them in 1994. In the 10 years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After Republicans let it expire, mass shootings tripled. Let’s finish the job and ban assault weapons again.”

The families of the victims of Stoneman Douglas are not a political monolith. Some agree with the president. Others embrace gun ownership and dismiss bans as political theater. Florida’s changes were perfectly suited for a “purple state,” balancing the call for action against the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Ryan Petty, a Parkland parent who lost his daughter Alaina in the shooting, is a political conservative who has argued for years in favor of the state’s red-flag law, which allows a law enforcement agency to seek and obtain an order to remove guns from people who are considered at risk of committing a crime. Florida has issued nearly 10,000 risk-protection orders since the red-flag law was passed.

Family members typically ask local law enforcement agencies to take weapons from someone who is expressing a desire to harm themself or someone else. The law enforcement agency must get a judge to sign off on the order before seizing any weapons. Judges have so far approved about 94% of the petitions, according to state figures.

But the orders are temporary. The targets usually get their weapons back after the emergency that prompted the order has passed.

In an interview last year, Petty said the law is a reasonable compromise between individual rights and public safety.

“With regard to the due-process issues, I get it. It feels like guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “But it seems to me that we are balancing the rights of law-abiding gun owners against the rights of individuals who have chosen and demonstrated that they are a threat to themselves or others. That’s the distinction I make, and that’s why I’ve supported and support red-flag laws like we have in Florida.”

Fort Lauderdale defense attorney Jim Lewis, who represented the target of Broward County’s first seizure under the red-flag law, agreed. “It should be limited to those people who are mentally deranged or involved in active disputes where gun violence might be imminent,” he said. “I think it’s appropriate in certain circumstances for the government to step in.”

The law enjoys widespread public support, Montalto said. “The red-flag laws, the change from 18 to 21. No one was voted out of office for passing that ... it had bi-partisan support,” he said. “There hasn’t been a huge backlash against it.”

But other Parkland parents said they are concerned that Florida is on the verge of undoing its progress on gun safety by pushing a proposal that would allow Floridians to carry concealed firearms without licenses.

“The laws that were passed in 2018 probably saved lives,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed at Stoneman Douglas. “But the supporters of this bill can’t point to how it will make anyone safer. Because it won’t.”

This summer, in the wake of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, March for Our Lives held another 450 marches in cities across the country.

“As part of a result of those, we helped pass several dozen gun laws on the state level and the first one in 30 years on the national level. It is progress,” Hogg said. In addition, he said, gun shooting survivors are more united. “To see the survivors come together and work together just gives me hope.”

Information from the News Service of Florida was used in this report.

Rafael Olmeda can be reached at rolmeda@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4457. Follow him on Twitter @rolmeda.