Florida lawmakers voted to declare porn a public health risk but refused to discuss a bill to ban assault weapons yesterday.
The resolution on porn, which passed in the state’s House of Representatives on Tuesday, claims that porn puts young people at risk of developing sexual dysfunctions and violent tendencies.
During the same session of the House, lawmakers voted against discussing a bill that would ban the assault rifles like the one that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz used to shoot and kill 17 people at his former high school just last week.
The pair of decisions have sparked fury in Florida and across the country.
Lawmakers in Florida voted on Tuesday to declare porn a public health risk
Florida House resolution HR 157 calls for ‘education, prevention, research and policy change to protect the citizens of this state’ from the dangers of pornography.
According to the bill, which was spearheaded in the House by Representative Ross Spano, there are links between pornography and ‘mental and physical illnesses.’
Spano’s bill blamed pornography for the ‘hypersexualization’ of children.
Research on the subject, however has turned up mixed results. Some experts have expressed concern over porn’s effects on relationships, while others have suggested that porn consumption is a symptom, rather than a cause, of underlying issues.
Pornography addiction was proposed for addition to the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) under the umbrella term ‘hypersexual behaviour disorder,’ but did not make the cut.
Yet the Florida bill says that ‘recent research indicated that one can develop a compulsive disorder in which excessive amounts of pornography are consumed.’
Research on gun violence as a public health issue, on the other hand, was banned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1996.
Students from the Florida high school where 17 people were shot and killed last week looked on from the state House gallery Tuesday as lawmakers refused to discuss an assault rifle ban
Assault rifles were the weapons of choice for the killers in the mass shootings in Las Vegas last year, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, and, of course, in last week’s attack on a Parkland, Florida high school.
In those four shootings alone, 151 people died.
A bill to ban assault rifles and large-capacity magazines has been circulating through several subcommittees in the Florida House of Representatives in recent months, but had not been scheduled for a hearing on the House floor.
Yesterday, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, where 14 students and three staff members were killed last week in Florida, travelled to the state capital to show support for the bill.
House Representative Kionne McGhee attempted a move to push the bill onto the floor for discussion ahead of schedule yesterday.
With tearful students in the gallery, lawmakers voted against discussing the bill in a 36 to 71 split.
The resolution declaring pornography a public health risk passed by voice vote and will now be considered in the Senate.