Every year, there's at least one bill in the Florida Legislature that becomes a poster child for the whole shebang up in Tallahassee.
Last year, there were two such award winners. One of them was the bill to raise our telephone rates. The other was the bill that said nobody can sue a dry cleaner whose chemicals pollute the ground.
What about this year? Well, it's a mistake to choose your nominee for poster child too early. Just when you think they can't come up with anything worse, they do.
So our nominees for the upcoming 2004 annual session must be tentative. One contender, certainly, will be the Legislature's proposal to "solve" the waiting list for Florida's kids who need health care - by simply abolishing the waiting list.
Yet an equally strong candidate will be Senate Bill 1156 and its counterpart, House Bill 149. They are bills to grant immunity to gun ranges for polluting the environment with lead and arsenic, and to require the taxpayers to pay for their initial cleanup.
You can't practice with a gun that fires bullets without, you know, the bullets. (Well, you can, but it's not quite the same.) But bullets don't just magically disappear. They add up. Therein lies the problem.
One gun range in Seminole County that decided to clean itself up produced 15,480 pounds of bullets in 2000, 12,800 pounds the next year, and 8,580 pounds the year after that. Other ranges cited in a legislative report generated comparable amounts.
It was a Tampa Bay range, the Skyway Trap and Skeet Club in Pinellas Park, that led to the filing of the bills. That club was sued by state agencies because the public owns adjacent land. The state agency claimed that 60 years of operation at the range had generated 7,000 to 13,000 tons of spent ammunition.
To the Florida affiliate of the National Rifle Association, the lawsuit was no less than "back door gun control," as executive director Marion Hammer branded it. The NRA put its muscle to work.
Under these bills, the state would not be able to file suit against polluting gun ranges. Furthermore, it would be the taxpayers, not the gun ranges, who paid for cleaning up the pollution for ranges that signed up with the state before Sept. 30, 2005.
Indeed, any government officials who tried to sue a gun range would actually be guilty of a crime - a felony in an earlier version of the bill, a first-degree misdemeanor now. It is a chest-thumping overkill.
If you believe the reasoning laid out in these bills, this law is needed because trying to punish gun ranges for pollution is actually an infringement of our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
The bill declares that every gun range is "a necessary component to the guarantees of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and of (section) 8, Article I of the State Constitution."
The bill also points out that not only do hunters use practice ranges, but so do law enforcement agencies, ROTC students, and even Olympic competitors. Cracking down on lead poisoning would drive the ranges out of business, and hence infringe on the Second Amendment.
Although we are still two weeks away from the opening of the Legislature, the bill is virtually ready to be enacted. In the Senate, it has sailed through all three committee votes. The House only bothered to send it to a single committee, and its next step is to be passed on the House floor.
Why will the Legislature grant more than 400 gun ranges immunity from lawsuit, and require you and me to pay for the initial cleanup? Because some lawmakers believe what they're saying, and the rest who vote for it are afraid of being labeled "anti-gun."
Me, I believe the Second Amendment includes an individual right to own firearms, which ranks right up there with free speech and all that business. I cheer when would-be crime victims shoot their attackers.
That seems "conservative" enough to me. I do not believe it also is necessary to demand the right to pump the environment full of lead, get off scot-free and force everybody else to pay for cleaning it up. In fact, there is a word for that kind of reliance on the government. It's called welfare.
