Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a bill into law that bans local governments from implementing their own gun control laws.
DeSantis signed the bill on Friday, but news of its signing broke on Monday. The bill expands on an existing law in the state that restricts local governments from enacting their own gun control regulations.
“The bill, which will take effect July 1, will broaden a 2011 law that can make local governments pay as much as $100,000 in damages if they are sued for imposing gun regulations,” Sun Sentinel reported. “DeSantis signed the bill about a month after a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal upheld the 2011 law that threatens penalties if cities and counties approve gun regulations.”
An individual or an organization may sue “any county, agency, municipality, district, or other entity in any court” if they have been “adversely affected by any ordinance, regulation, measure, directive, rule, enactment, order, or policy, whether written or unwritten,” the law states. Plantiffs can collect incurred damages of up to $100,000 and interest on the sums awarded “shall accrue at the legal rate from the date on which suit was filed.”
Florida has banned cities and counties from imposing their own gun control laws that are stricter than the state’s laws since 1987.
Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at the University of Stanford who also has a PhD in economics, praised DeSantis in a recent interview for the way that he managed the state of Florida’s response to the pandemic.
“I’ve never met a politician that like him. He’s extraordinary,” Bhattacharya said. “We had a two-hour conversation, about COVID policies, this is in September of last year … and he had read all the papers I referenced and not just my just my articles, lots and lots of other papers. He knew all the details, it was a remarkable conversation. And then we had this like roundtable on September 25th, with Martin and Mike Leavitt, and with DeSantis leading it, and the next day he lifted most of the restrictions all across Florida.”
“He could go up against an epidemiologists,” Bhattacharya said. “I mean, most, most epidemiologists don’t know the literature as well as he does. I mean, I just I don’t have the words… I’ve just been, I’m still stunned by it, I didn’t know anything about him actually, before, you know, basically before September really. I’ve just been very impressed.”
Bhattacharya said that Florida’s success during the pandemic was not the result of luck, but was a direct result of DeSantis being so well informed.
This is an excerpt from The Daily Wire.
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