Rick Scott says let states decide gun-buying age, but put armed guards in every school

Three days after a mass shooting at a Texas shopping mall left eight people dead and seven injured, Republican Sen. Rick Scott indicated that he does not back national gun violence reforms like the ones he signed as Florida governor in the aftermath of the February 2018 school shooting at a high school in Parkland. Instead, he called for Congress to fund armed officers for every public and private school, even though studies don’t show that installing armed officers reduces injuries or deaths in school shootings.

During an appearance by Scott on “This Morning” on Tuesday, CNN’s Phil Mattingly asked him about his take on gun safety legislation, mentioning a bill prohibiting the sale of AR-15-style assault rifles to anyone under age 21 that advanced out of committee in the Texas House on Monday.

“Why don’t you think that works at the federal level?” Mattingly asked.

“Well, first off, I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe that we should not be restricting access to guns for law-abiding Americans,” Scott said. “But I think what we’ve got to do is, we gotta look at everything we do, just like what we did after the Parkland shooting. I brought mental health counselors together, educators together, law enforcement together and said, What can we do? And one thing was, we put law enforcement in all of our public schools.”

When he was governor of Florida, Scott signed a law in March 2018 raising the state minimum age to purchase a gun from 18 to 21 following the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 people. The law also instituted a three-day waiting period for gun buyers and prohibited bump stocks, while arming some school staff and investing in school security and mental health programs.

Scott changed the subject during the interview to the School Guardian Act, a bill he is sponsoring that would divert $80 billion appropriated in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act from helping the Internal Revenue Service modernize operations to paying for armed police officers in schools across the nation. “I think every mom and dad would say, I’d rather have a law enforcement officer to be a deterrent in my school, rather than another IRS agent,” Scott said.

Mattingly pressed Scott on the age requirement and an unsuccessful recent effort by some Republican legislators in Florida to roll it back to age 18, asking if he supports what Florida Republicans are doing.

Scott said states should set those rules: “So I support what we did and it’s kept our schools safe. … Every state can make that decision for what fits in their state. But right now what I’m trying to do is, I know something that really did work in our state, I want to get that done nationally, and that’s get a law enforcement officer in every school in this country.”

In an email, a Scott spokesperson told the American Independent Foundation: “The School Guardian Act does not mandate law enforcement in schools. It establishes a block grant program administered by the U.S. Attorney General to provide federal funding to support the placement of armed law enforcement personnel at every K-12 school in the nation.”

The spokesperson noted that the bill has been endorsed by an array of law enforcement groups but did not answer questions about why Scott chose only that provision of the measures he enacted in his state for a federal bill.

A RAND Corporation review of gun policy research through 2020 found that no studies conclusively proved the effectiveness of armed guards in schools. 

In February 2021, JAMA Network Open published a research letter by criminal justice researchers at Hamline University and Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, who had examined 133 mass school shootings in the United States between 1980 and 2019. They found “armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries; in fact, controlling for the aforementioned factors of location and school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present.”

Armed resource officers were present at several schools that had mass shootings in recent years. In the Parkland shooting, the school’s armed resource officer waited outside the school for at least four minutes and failed to prevent the shooting.

Gun safety advocates have pushed for laws to keep guns out of the hands of anyone under age 21. According to the nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety, Florida is one of 22 states that have increased the minimum age for purchases.

The group notes on its website: “Firearms are the leading cause of death for young people ages 18 to 20, and the firearm suicide rate among this group has increased 41% in the last decade. Eighteen to 20-year-olds commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults 21 years and older.”

In its research, RAND found that minimum age requirements may decrease gun suicide rates among young people. 

Though it did not deem the results conclusive, it noted that one study “found a suggestive effect consistent with laws setting 21 as the minimum age of purchase reducing the likelihood of a mass shooting occurrence in models that included controls for political factors.”

In 2014, Scott had an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund. The pro-gun group downgraded him to a C rating in 2018 after he signed the gun reform law.

Since becoming a senator in 2019, Scott has consistently toed the line of the gun industry. When the Senate passed a bipartisan gun compromise bill in June 2023 on a 65-33 vote, he voted no and said the bill “abandons Florida’s model and allows even the most radical policies, like California’s red flag law, to be implemented and supported with federal funding.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the U.S. firearms industry, gave Scott an A- rating for 2019 and 2020 and an A+ rating for 2021 and 2022.

The Gun Violence Archive has documented 208 mass shootings in the United States already in 2023.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.