A proposed Constitutional amendment that would ban assault weapons was filed for the 2020 ballot this month.
The Ban Assault Weapons Now (BAWN) group filed the proposed amendment with the Florida Division of Elections. According to the proposal, the amendment would ban possession of “any semiautomatic rifle or shotgun capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition at once.”
People who already own weapons that would be banned would be required to register the weapon by make, model, and serial number with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The gun owners would be required to give up the weapons within a year of the amendment’s passage.
Defining so-called assault weapons has been a contentious issue in politics, with gun owners typically arguing that groups like BAWN define them improperly.
In the proposal, BAWN says that assault weapons include any gun, barring handguns, that hold “more than 10 rounds of ammunition at once, either in a fixed or detachable magazine, or any other ammunition-feeding device.”
Those devices include “any magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device for a firearm,” the group claimed.
The amendment also defines semiautomatic weapons as guns which “fire a single projectile or a number of ball shots through a rifled or smooth bore for each single function of the trigger without further manual action required.”
Only the guns as defined used by military or law enforcement would be legal; private ownership would be banned. Anyone caught possessing such a gun would be charged with a third-degree felony, according to the current language of the proposal.
BAWN is primarily composed of family members of the victims of shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the Pulse nightclub.
“Our goal is to take military-style firearms off the shelves thus saving the lives of innocent people,” said BAWN Chairman Gail Schwartz in a statement in September, when it was announced that BAWN and Americans for Gun Safety Now would attempt to pass the assault weapons ban in Florida.
But a federal assault weapons ban which was passed in 1994 and lasted 10 years didn’t have a clear impact on crime, according to a report sponsored by the Department of Justice and conducted by the University of Pennsylvania (pdf). “There has not been a clear decline in the use of assault rifles,” the researchers wrote.
In addition, assault weapons in total were only used in about two percent of gun crimes prior to the ban, the researchers said, and most of those were assault pistols, which weren’t under the federal ban or under the proposed Florida ban.
The Florida proposal would need 766,200 signatures to make the 2020 ballot and would need to be approved by 60 percent or more voters to take effect.
