Safety of Religious Institutions: Authorizes religious institution to allow concealed weapons or concealed firearms licensee to carry firearm on property of institution for certain purposes.
Subsection (12) of section 790.06, Florida Statutes, is amended to read:
Remove lines 54-59 and insert:
(c) For the purposes of safety, security, personal protection, or other lawful purposes, a church, a synagogue, or any other religious institution may authorize a person licensed under this section to carry a firearm on property owned, rented, leased, or lawfully used by the church, synagogue, or religious institution.
Nice clean bill. I wish all bills were like this. Voting went 79 Yeas to 35 Nays with what seems like a decent amount of Democrats supporting.
Another one I am cautiously optimistic.
This is a good thing I guess, but I don’t understand why the state has to approve whether or not a church’s members can carry a concealed weapon onto church property. I would think this should be up to the church and its members.
In a state that honors individual liberty that would clearly be true, but many states do not and think it’s perfectly reasonable to limit what people can do on private property.
Consider that Florida also says (at least did at the time of the Pulse attack) that you can’t be armed, even when not drinking, in a bar or night club. Same issue and for both cases we know from actual events what the bad outcome can be.
The issue that this bill addresses is one where a church that had weekday kids programs or schools on it’s grounds made it a “Gun Free Zone” even during it’s primary mission of being a church on Sunday. Supposedly a “bug” but which the anti-gun-owner crowd sought to exploit.