Florida's attorney general is trying to block a ban on guns used in mass shootings

Florida’s Republican attorney general does not want voters in her state to even have the opportunity to express their position on an assault weapons ban.

Ashley Moody asked the state’s Supreme Court on Friday to block a ballot initiative which would create an amendment to the state constitution banning assault weapons.

Ban Assault Weapons Now, a group based in Miami, Florida, has already collected over 99,000 certified signatures backing the initiative’s placement on the ballot in 2020.

Moody alleges the proposed amendment is “deficient” and would mislead voters. She claims the language would ban popular hunting rifles and shotguns. The pro-gun extremists at the National Rifle Association are backing Moody and issued a “Florida Alert” to their supporters about her legal maneuvering.

“We are confident with our chances at the Supreme Court, and presented with the choice to do so, we are confident that the people of Florida will overwhelmingly support this common-sense measure to ban weapons of war to make our communities safer,” Gail Schwartz, chair of Ban Assault Weapons Now, said in a statement.

Schwartz’s nephew, Alex Schachter, was killed in the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.

Assault weapons like the AR-15 have been used at some of the worst mass shootings in American history, including the attack on Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, along with the shootings at Sandy Hook and at a Pittsburgh synagogue last year.

“Having those weapons in civilian hands is madness,” retired Army Col. Ralph Peters, a conservative, said in a Fox News appearance last year. ” These weapons — AR-15 and similar weapons — are not for sporting purposes. You don’t take them hunting because they’re meant to tear bodies apart. They tear up the meat.”

“The purpose of the AR-15 series weapons is to kill and maim human beings. That’s it.”

Despite that assessment and the weapons’ deadly role in American history, the NRA and its allies — like Moody — have opposed legislation regulating public safety.

The obsession with keeping these guns circulating has gone so far that Moody doesn’t even want the public to be given a choice to weigh in, perhaps because if people get to speak up, they will choose to protect their children and communities.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.